


Hooversuck of an Empty Space

by tentaclecore (grue)



Series: shit happens in space [1]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Crack Treated Seriously, F/F, F/M, Kid Fic, M/M, Space Opera
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-09-12
Updated: 2016-10-07
Packaged: 2018-08-14 17:24:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 22,378
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8022649
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grue/pseuds/tentaclecore
Summary: Shanks coughs and crosses his arms. "Yeah man, I doubt there'll be a legion of the faithful lining up to pay tribute to Monkey Meat."Tilde freezes. So does Burton."You've named the evil incarnate," Burton says flatly."Ah-yup." Shanks nods."You named what is essentially a god, "Monkey Meat".""That's an affirmative."Burton narrows his eyes, curls his lip into a snarl."Get out of my house."





	1. earth time a go go time 1/6

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Nina_Muerta](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nina_Muerta/gifts).



The bar is a bit empty for this time of day, but then again, most of the regular customers are probably still at home watching television. Marvin Pyre takes a mouthful of his beer. Swishes it around in his mouth a bit. Calmly leans to the side and spits it out onto the floor.

"You're cleaning that up," the bartender shouts from across the room.

Pyre waves a majestic long-fingered hand in his direction, which could mean many different things, the top three being:  
one: I'll do as you say momentarily,  
two: I recognise you're saying something by which I am acknowledging with the movement of my hand, or  
three: feck off, mate.

Regardless, Pyre does not take another sip of the drink. Instead, he shoves the bottle away and puts his head down flat onto the (slightly) sticky table before him. His straw-coloured hair is a startling contrast to the black tabletop, the pinkish colour of his scalp showing through the thin strands all the more prominent.

"Have to 'ta keep the pillow dry," he slurs. He's still got glitter smeared across his mouth, there's residue of it on the bottle now.

Tilde hums and purses their lips. Taps their fingers on the table, nails making little _tak tak tak_ noises as they artlessly go about it.

"Just because you lost the competition," they tut, "you've been reduced."

"Reduction is a way of life," Pyre replies. He shrugs his bony shoulders. "Way of my life."

"You are pathetic."

"Never had to be anything but."

Their eyes narrow. Embracing androgyny is hard enough on their score when it comes to The Competition, given how the judges struggle with how to refer to them, or even _look_ at them, but they never got _this_ bad about the persistent taste of defeat.

"Save the ennui for your annual lecture series, dear," they elect to say, rather than _buck up mate, at least you didn't lose because the announcer doesn't know what to call you and it confused the damn audience_.

The door to the pub bangs open and everyone but Pyre turns to look at the elephant walking into the room. Rather, the loud human known as Langston Shanks, and Tilde rolls their eyes as he stomps over to their table.

Shanks tips his hat to them, grins to show off his sharp white teeth, stretches the tanned skin of his face to make himself look friendly. They deign to nod in acknowledgement, which is all the blighter is going to get so he best be appeased with it.

It seems he is, because he slumps into the chair opposite them and grabs Pyre's abandoned drink, drains it in one long pull. The man has a long neck for such a compact body.

"Are you not embarking on the journey of sobriety?" Tilde asks. Their fingers go _tak tak tak_ on the table a bit faster.

"Nah, that's PR," Shanks says. He's very American in his mannerisms, never would be called a timid man, which is probably best. If he didn't swagger his way onto the International Stage, just like his country, then he'd be squashed as an upstart in mere moments.

Then Shanks leans down to peer into Pyre's ear, wrinkles his nose, and says loudly, "SORRY ABOUT YOUR EX-FUCKTOY WINNING."

Pyre startles away from the noise and falls out of his chair with arms a-flail. He lands like the anaemic sack of skin and bones he is: squishy, clattering noise abound, and not at all elegantly.

"Your emotional maturity has reached an all-time high," Tilde says as Shanks leans back into his chair to have a laugh. "As always, you astound me."

"Thanks honey," he smiles, tips his hat for the second time.

Tilde bares their teeth at him and magnanimously allows Pyre to use their chair to drag himself up.

**# # # #**

_STAR-STUDDED EVENT_ , the fliers say for The Competition. _THE DOG AND PONY SHOW OF THE YEAR_ , the participants call it among themselves. It's a weeklong series of concerts, like the Olympics but without World Leaders making an appearance at the Opening and Closing ceremonies.

The rules are this: hundreds of musicians, actors, dancers, and interpretive performance artists show up at the behest of their country's dismal Universe Ratings on the television. Hundreds of musicians, actors, dancers, and interpretive performance artists then proceed to make utter fools of themselves in front of a ten camera setup and an auditorium full of people dragged in off the street. Depending on the decibels recorded during the applause when each set is finished, an act is either barred from entering the next round, or thrown into the underground rooms to await their battle matchups.

The battle matchups can get a bit bloody, but no one dies unless they have a blood disease. That's how a Neil Young impersonator bit it. Burst eardrum, bled out right on stage. Terrible for his family, but excellent for ratings.

After the battle matchups, those who are left are able to give their best and whittle down the numbers even more. One left standing in every designation are listed as Graduates, and they get all the money and recompense that comes with Earth being Very Pleased with them.

Tilde is an actor. They participate in Historical Dramas and Shakespearian-type plays, and they _always_ get knocked out before the battle matchups. Pyre was in the audience when the applause didn't rate for their performance. He clapped harder, tried to whoop, but it was dull and lifeless against the tentative clapping.

He went to the window to wave at them as they were escorted out along with the rest of their theatre troupe. They turned back to wave, then gestured down the street. At the usual drinking hole, then. It's good to have friends.

Pyre himself is a solo musician with the the house band to back him. He got to second place of his division this year, and it's still not good enough, so he got soused on two bottles of wine on an empty stomach, and there was some yelling in his ear, and now he's being dragged by Tilde and the loud bloke down the street.

"Are you _American_?" Pyre asks. His face is mashed into the man's shoulder. He hasn't the energy to raise it and identify the face. "Is that why yer so rude?"

"He's rude because of upbringing and possibly some past trauma," Tilde says. They minored in psychology in Uni and haven't let anyone forget it, especially those who dropped out of a promising Law Degree to go to Art School instead like _some_ people they refuse to name.

"Nah, I'm rude cos I'm emotionally stunted and a vagrant." The man's voice rumbles pleasantly against Pyre's aching head. That shouldn't happen, to be quite honest. "It's what you said last year."

Tilde sniffs, digs their fingers into Pyre's side as they help drag him along. "Evolving theory about what's wrong with you will always be a hobby of mine."

"I knew you liked me!"

"I _tolerate_ you. I've no idea what Marvin's motivation for letting you hang around is."

"Stuck to my shoe," Pyre says, and Shanks-- he knows it's Shanks now, he recognises that smoky cracked growl of his-- the man just _laughs_.

"The most persistent of us are, kid."

"He's older than you by half a decade!"

Shanks laughs again.

**# # # #**

The hotel Tilde booked for themselves is on the rough side of town. The Competition never pays for lodging unless one gets to first place in their selected medium, and Tilde has never been one to toss money down a bottomless pit.

Pyre ended up at the same hotel, but more because no one pays the full rate to attend his lectures, and he hasn't given a concert in _ages_ , so he's running a bit slim in the wallet area. Among other places.

Tilde lets Shanks take over for keeping Pyre upright as they get the room door open. Number 148 out of 500, because massive shoebox hotels simply cannot go without having fifty rooms on ten floors and every single one of them moulding, slightly wet to the touch.

Shanks drags Pyre into the room after them. They pull back the coverlet so he won't sweat onto the topcoat of mildew, and Shanks dumps him into a glittery heap right in the middle.

"Thank you for your assistance," Tilde says.

Shanks looks around instead of answering. Pyre didn't bring much with him, just a couple changes of clothing and some product left in the bath. The sequins on Pyre's discarded trousers seem to entrance the man.

Tilde lets him look as they shove Pyre's limbs around on the bed. He's too pale again. His hair is too long. They tut and yank off his shoes, flips the dry side of the coverlet over his prone form, then turns to stop Shanks from opening Pyre's valise.

"We should leave him _alone_." And on the final word, they shove Shanks out the door, closing it behind them.

Pyre snuffles into his damp pillow and slumbers on.

**# # # #**

His mouth is dry. His tongue is absolute cotton, his lips feel cracked, and his jaw has a crick in it that indicates that this open position he's in is probably an uncomfortable one.

Thank God the curtains are drawn, is all he can think. Thank you, whichever God is accountable today, for closing those curtains so he can escape the agony of the more unpleasant aspects of the Earth's rotation.

He cracks open his eyes. One is smashed into the pillow along with the rest of his face so he closes it again. The other gives a good idea of where he is: Room 148, Of course.

Once, many years ago, he asked for a room on the top floor. They put him in the best one, according to the concierge, and he woke up the day before The Competition startled by a deranged pelican smashing through the window. Since then, he's stayed in Room 148.

Pyre's neck has frozen. He groans, flexes a bit. He's too young for these kinds of foibles, especially for a man with a proclivity for glitter. He gathers his arms under him, shoves up, falls off the bed in a big roll.

He hurts all over and his stomach is pitching like he's on a boat, so he elects to crawl to the bathroom. The piled eggcream carpet gives way to blue tilework gives way to the metal rim track for the shower door.

There's something inside the shower, so he sits back on his heels, waits for his head to stop spinning, and tries to focus.

There's a massive egg in there, and it's stopping him from getting inside, to be perfectly honest. Big and round and slimy and green and oh, _it shouldn't be there_ , should it? He leans against the wall and reaches with a limp hand to poke at it. The shell gives under his touch like a dried sponge and he jerks his hand back quickly.

It doesn't move.

He reaches over to poke it again.

This time it rolls at him, catches at the metal track, rebounds violently back into the depth of the shower.

Pyre scrambles backwards on his arse like a crab. He's out of the bathroom and has his back flat against the hall in no time at all.

"Hallo," he tries. More like a whisper than a proper salutation, but it'll do.

The egg rolls in a circle, makes soft repetitive squishing noises against the tiles.

"Oh my God," Pyre says. He needs to get to Tilde. Tilde will know what to do, who to tell, how to _kill_ it.

**# # # #**

Outside room 316, Pyre knocks and knocks and knocks.

After a good five minutes, Langston Shanks opens the door shirtless and squinting in the hallway light. Pyre takes this in, then begins to have a bit of a fit.

"Calm down, calm down." Shanks slings his jacket over his bare shoulders and closes the door behind him. Pyre clenches his fists and calms down, but _not_ because Shanks told him to.

"Must you sleep with _all_ of my friends?" Pyre seethes at him.

Shanks begins to rummage in the pockets of his coat. A lighter and a black cigarette case is produced. "I haven't had sex with all of them, don't be dramatic."

He can't help himself; Pyre brandishes a fist at the closed door. "You just slept with Tilde! _My friend_! And you've slept with Inez, and with--"

"I haven't slept with all your friends," Shanks interrupts. He lights his cigarette, mumbles his words around his lips clenched on the filter. "That dog of yours, Admiral Whassit."

"Colonel Pamplimest," Pyre says, flat.

"Yeah, him. That great old Dane of yours. Haven't touched a hair on his head." With a click the lighter is off, shoved back into his jacket pocket along with the cigarette case. Shanks grins and smoke ekes out from between his teeth, out his nostrils.

Pyre's head hurts. It's hurt the whole while, but the burst of anger dulled it for a moment. Now it's back, banging on his forehead and chanting obscenities at his grey matter.

"You’re saying." And here Pyre has to steady himself, but Shanks reaches out to help and he has to recoil back a step. "You're saying I should be grateful that you've not gone as far as _bestiality_ , is that what you're saying?"

Shanks' hand is still outstretched. His smile looks forced. "I was making a point."

"And what point was that?!"

"That I haven't slept with all your friends."

Shanks slowly pulls back his hand, slides it into his pockets. He should look utterly ridiculous standing there in nothing but a trench coat, barely zipped slacks, and _chest hair_ , but he doesn't. He looks odd, but not _ridiculous_.

Pyre has to pick his battles. And while he still wants to yell, to fight for Tilde's honour, he just can't manage right now.

"There's an egg in my shower," Pyre says. Shanks blinks, but before he can reply Pyre keeps talking. "It might have rolled out by now, but there's a massive egg in my shower and it's moving."

Shanks exhales a plume of smoke. It tastes delicious to Pyre, ten years off the fag, so he tries to be good, not inhale, and fails miserably.

"Let's go see it, huh?" Shanks steps past Pyre, barefoot and underdressed. He leads the way to the lift like a confidence man on his way to a hit.

Pyre is helpless to do anything but follow him.


	2. earth time a go go time 2/6

The egg is still there, rolling around the shower drain and vibrating, making a loud _hummmmmmm_ against the tiles.

Shanks stubs out his cigarette in the sink while he inspects it from afar.

"Did you touch it?"

Pyre has elected to stay outside the room. If it grows teeth and claws and decides it's hungry, he won't be the first in line, no sir. "Twice," he answers. "It felt spongy."

"Egg shells are just hardened membranes anyway," Shanks mutters. He takes a step closer to the shower. His bare feet make no noise against the tiles.

"How do you know things about egg shells?" Pyre asks.

Shanks shrugs, either to indicate that he spends time on Wikipedia, or that his day job when not being a hotshot jazz musician is that of a chicken whisperer.

Granted, Pyre knows the latter cannot be true because he's seen the television specials. Shanks spends more time touring than most people, drunk and covered in smoke and joking with the crowd so they leave tips on the top of his piano when the show is over. He follows the Dean Martin way of entertaining, but instead of pretending to sip at that glass of bourbon, he guzzles an entire fifth and calls for more.

Shanks gets closer, stops at maybe two feet from the open shower. He reaches out to touch the door, gentle.

The egg comes to a halt right next to the door, goes deer in the headlights still.

"I can see it curled up in there," he says.

"You can see _what_?"

"The shell is thin enough. I can see it." Shanks sounds scared. Or in awe. Or both.

The egg rolls back to against the wall, then rushes forward. Shanks startles and throws the stall door closed with a loud bang.

The egg hits the bevelled glass hard and wet. It starts to roll around the stall in circles, squishing like a mechanical sponge wringer.

"Do something!" Pyre yells. He's back against the wall again, but he's standing, he can run away if need be.

Shanks stands outside the shower door, one hand braced on the sink and the other held out behind him, stretched towards Pyre. Like he's trying to keep him back and safe, which is utterly insane.

"HEY KEEP IT FUCKING _DOWN_ OVER THERE," a man in the next room over shouts.

Pyre yells "Terribly sorry!" just as the egg rolls back against the wall and then slams into the door again. The glass shakes from the impact, wobbles on the metal track.

"Hey, stop it," Shanks tells the egg. He's borderline snarling, like he does when he has to deal with hecklers on television. Pyre puts his hands over his ears and tries to think.

It pauses, comes to a gentle stop against the door. Shanks squints and peers at it through the bevelled glass.

"Must you get so close?" Pyre asks. He's all the way across the room and he still feels like he's in the danger zone. "It might hatch and eat your face off."

"You've seen too many movies," Shanks mumbles. He taps a finger against the shower door, _tap tap tap_.  
The egg rolls back from the door, wobbles a moment, slams forward again.

"Bollocks," Pyre moans. He fumbles at his pocket, intent on his mobile. "We need Tilde. I should have waited for them instead of taking you, how stupid am I?"

"Not wise, man," Shanks says. He's still watching the egg, winces with every hit it makes.

"Oh? How is this not wise?" Pyre's voice is climbing, he's yelling now. "Tell me, you brilliant man, _why shouldn't I call them_?"

"Why the hell would _Tilde_ know what to do in this kind of situation?" Shanks yells back. "This thing would knock 'em over as soon as look at them."

"Does it have eyes now?"Pyre asks, alarmed.

Shanks pauses. "Well. No?"

"Don't scare me like that!" Pyre goes back to groping at his trouser pockets.

"Christ, I should have just left town last night," Shanks says.

"Yes, you _should_ have," Pyre snarls. "But no time for morning after regrets, is there?"

Shanks gives Pyre A Look and the neighbour bangs on the wall again.

" _I'LL CALL THE MANAGER, YOU HOMOS!_ "

"No need!" Pyre shouts back, "I'm certain he's on his way presently!"

The egg slams into the door twice in quick succession, which causes them both to jump.

"Think it understands English?" Shanks asks.

Pyre rolls his eyes. He also presses himself as hard against the wall as he can, angles his body so he can run out the door if need be.

The door to the next room opens, slams. The neighbour stomps to Pyre's door and bellows, "I'M GETTING THE MANAGER AND YOU GONNA GET KICKED OUT! FAGGOTS!" then stomps down the hall.

The lift dings. Pyre rubs at his face with one hand and watches Shanks pick up a bar of soap and tentatively take a step closer to the shower stall.

"What are you going to do with bloody _soap_?" Pyre hisses, and Shanks waves his hand at him without taking eyes off the egg at the bottom of the shower.

"Hey, little one," Shanks says, soft and in a borderline sing-song, "Not gonna hurt you, just want to see what you look like, okay? You gonna let me say hi?"

The egg stops rolling around, goes still against the wall.

Shanks glances back at Pyre, shrugs, and puts his hand on the handle.

"Just want to look at you," Shanks says, tenses.

The egg wobbles a bit, to Pyre it looks like it's squirming. Then it rolls with unnatural speed at the door, crashes through it, glass pieces and shards flying everywhere, heading straight for Shanks' legs.

Shanks jumps back and out of the way. "Fuck!"

The thing flies like a cannonball, low to the floor and breaking a qualified suburbia speed limit. Pyre throws himself back against the front door as it cracks against the wall where he was, blows a hole right through it and into the next room.

A heavy squish, a crack, and then everything is silent. A splintering noise echos inside the other room's bathroom. Chunks of drywall dislodge and fall to the floor like an afterthought.

Pyre takes a tentative step to the hole. He examines it, ignores Shanks' cursing. The hole must be three feet in diameter, he supposes.

He looks back into the bathroom. Shanks is sitting on the sink counter, resting his bare feet in the sink. There's blood splattered on the floor and down the front of the cabinets.

"Will you live?" he asks just to be polite.

Shanks growls and kicks on the water with the heel of his foot. Blood is left smeared on the tap.

Pyre crouches back down to peer at the egg. It's quivering and it looks like the shell is made of rubber, since its flexing with whatever that is inside's movements.

A spiderweb of cracks are starting from the bottom and running to the top. They are stark in the fluorescent bathroom lighting the neighbour left on. He can see something dark and slimy wiggling around inside the shell.

A good quarter of the top of the shell falls off onto the floor. Inside is a creature that looks like congealed seaweed that has been blackened with soot. It writhes around and knocks more shell off, until it is only sitting in the lower half of the so-called hardened membrane.

The creature is roughly the size of a human infant at one month. The top of it shudders and shakes as a bulge forms, rises upward, creates a head with no neck right on top. It's a monstrous snowman from hell, but there isn't any snow and there definitely aren't any carrots around to use for a nose.

A slit in the centre of the top mass slides open. It looks like an eye blinking and is aimed a the ceiling, Pyre tries to duck down even lower to get a better look without actually getting _closer_ to the damn thing.

A squelching noise. A pop. And a round orb rolls out of the open slit and hits the carpet.

The eye rolls around with its own momentum, comes to a stop in the direction of Pyre. He swallows, switches his gaze between the mess of a thing sitting in the remains of the egg and the eye like a tennis match. Forty love, in all its surrealism and migraine.

An opening appears under the eye hole comes into existence, shows some kind of yellow blunted saw tooth lining on the top and the bottom, a hole into a black abyss beyond that.

The mouth shuts, opens, shuts again. The third time on opening, something flexes in the darkness visible even to Pyre crouching three yards away.

It begins to wail.

"Oh Christ, what the fuck is that?" Shanks asks from the bathroom.

Pyre looks back, sees the man hop off the counter and try to tip toe through shards of glass. He's dripping blood everywhere.

"The egg hatched," Pyre explains while trying not to shudder. He gestures with both wobbling hands at the hole. "I don't think it's happy."

Shanks gets to the carpeted hallway and crouches down beside Pyre. He looks at the creature.

"Hey kid, cool it," he shouts.

Remarkably, the creature goes silent.

"What's that thing?" Shanks points at the eyeball.

"I think it's an eye. It popped out after the head came up."

Shanks squints at it, then shrugs and begins to crawl on all fours through the hole. Pyre grabs the back of his coat and tries to stop him.

"Don't do that!" he yells.

The creature burps and sniffles, wiggles around on the eggshells. Through the sliver of space between the top of the hole and Shanks' back, Pyre can see long but thin flippers detach from the creature's mass and prod at the floor around it.

"You cool it too," Shanks orders. He shrugs out of his jacket like an eel and proceeds into the next room, leaving Pyre holding an empty trench coat. "Everyone just be cool," Shanks says.

The lift down the hall dings, and the angry voice of the neighbour carries out. "I told them fags to keep it down, good decent people like me need our sleep, but did they quiet down? NO THEY FUCKING DIDN'T!"

Another voice, male but a lower register and volume, answers. "I will take care of the issue presently, Mister Russo. Please direct me to the room."

"I'll deal with this, you deal with that," Shanks orders. He doesn't turn back to look at him.

Pyre scrambles to stand. He's still holding the trench coat, so he drops it to the floor. After rubbing a sweaty hand through his hair, taking a deep breath, and pasting on the biggest smile he can manage, he jerks open his door.

The manager is a stout Asian man with a buzzcut and tweezed eyebrows. Pyre's neighbour stands behind him, large and viking-like and wearing a glittering gold watch on his wrist that goes perfectly with his blue and white gingham pyjamas.

The manager's face is stern. The neighbour's is ruddy-faced and looks like a moon.

"Hallo, we're keeping it down now," Pyre says, still smiling.

The manager takes only a moment to recover.

"Case as that may be, Sir, but I must insist on examining the premises. There's been a complaint of breaking noises from Mister Russo here."

"Break dancing? No, no, don't have the bones for it, see?"

Pyre shows off his double-jointed thumb to illustrate. The manager recoils a step. He almost bumps into Pyre's neighbour, who is glaring over the manager's shoulder.

"You're a idiot too?" Russo sneers.

A loud _grawp_ noise happens behind Pyre, and Shanks shouts in surprise.

"Son of a whore! You try to bite me again and I'll bite you back you little bastard!"

The manager tries to look around Pyre into the room. Pyre casually slides to the side to block his view.

"You have children in your room?" The manager asks slowly. His perfectly shaped eyebrows arch in question.

Pyre feels his smile slipping. He doesn't know if he'll be able to paste it back on once it's fallen. "No, no children. We're not child-fearing folk, I'm afraid."

Another noise, this time a _garkle_ , and Shanks shouts "Arrgh" right after.

"Sounds like you got a kid in there," Russo says. "Sounds like a Thai prostitution ring."

Pyre blinks at the man. The manager turns to look at him too, dots of red form on the man's cheeks.

"You know what a Sex Tourism ring sounds like?" Pyre asks.

Russo says "uh" and the manager turns back to Pyre. His eyes are shining. He doesn't look very happy.

The manager shifts to the other side and tries to peer past Pyre again. Pyre tosses himself bodily to the other side of the doorframe to continue blocking. Now his shoulder hurts.

Russo stands on his toes to look over Pyre into the room, and he makes a gargling noise of rage deep in his throat.

"They broke into my room!" he shouts. He lunges for his own door and fumbles with the keycard into the slot to open it.

The manager can see the destruction now too because Pyre is gently hitting his forehead on the doorframe with a series of _thud thud thuds_.

"I'm afraid the costs of repairs will be added to your bill," the manger explains. "And you will not be allowed back next year, I'm sorry."

For what it's worth, the man does look sorry. Pyre nods his head, and Shanks opens the neighbour's door from the inside to blow cigarette smoke right into the neighbour's face.

"What's shaking?" Shanks asks the man.

Russo stares for a moment, then roars and grabs Shanks by the shoulder to shake him. Shanks lets himself be tossed around like a rag doll, keeping his lit cigarette clenched in his teeth as his head snaps back and forth.

Finally he lets Shanks go, who slumps against the doorframe with a dazed look in his eyes.

"You're a fucking pansy mama's boy," Russo snarls at Pyre. He rounds on Shanks. "Perverted freak!"

"Hey, now you're just slinging nonsense," Shanks drawls as he hobbles out into the hallway. "He and I are _both_ perverts, no mamas needed."

"Faggots! _In my room!_ " Russo's scream of horror reverberates in Pyre's skull, he clutches at the sides of his head to try to stop the headache from spreading.

"Spreading faggot juices everywhere!" Russo screeches.

Shanks presses his bare shoulder against the doorframe and slithers against it.

"Sir, what are you doing?" The manager asks. His eyes are wide and he's got his back pressed to the opposite wall.

"Marking my territory," Shanks says, then steps away to contemplate it. "There, this one's mine now."

"You fucking-- Wait, what's that _thing_?" Russo shouts. He shoves past Shanks to stand in the open doorway to his room. "What the fuck is that?"

"You didn't _hide_ it?" Pyre hisses at Shanks.

Shanks shrugs. "Where would I shove it? Under the bed?"

The manager holds out a hand towards Russo, "Now, Mister Russo, please wait for a moment so--"

A sound like an industrial-strength hoover starts up from inside Russo's room. The creature gurgles as background noise, Pyre takes a step away out of instinctual self-preservation.

Shanks can see what's going on in the room and he takes a step back too.

"What the-" Russo tries to shout, then he collapses at the knees and is dragged backwards along the carpet into his room.

Pyre can see the creature now, mouth open wide, sawteeth glistening with a brackish-looking spittle. The mouth is bigger than it is, looks like. The abyss down its throat is absolute, pitch black and all-consuming as it twists and contracts.

Russo screams hideously as his feet disappear into its maw, then his knees, then up to his waist. He windmills his arms and tries to dig his fingernails into the carpet, succeeds in leaving ragged and torn lines through the pile as he is sucked into the creature.

"Help," Russo whimpers, then his entire torso slides down the creature's throat, his shoulders pop, dislocate, what remains of him contorts like his bones are soup, and then he's gone.

The creature snaps its mouth shut after Russo's head, pats at the ground around it.

"Is it just me, or did that look like a cartoon?" Shanks asks.

The Hotel Manager faints dead away and lands on the hallway floor flat on his back with a very loud thump.

The creature belches softly and extends the new flipper things out into the air, waggles them a bit.

"I think we need to leave," Shanks says, breaking the silence. He's leaning against the wall and staring at the murderous creature blankly. "We really need to get out of here."

Pyre can't agree more. He takes one step away from the room and into the hall, says "I absolutely have no argument about such an action, let's get--"

The thing shrieks at them and Pyre freezes.

It lunges into the air, without rhyme or reason or the laws of physics involved. It lunges, and it clears the two yards from the doorway of the dead neighbour's hotel room to Pyre's legs, and it collides with Pyre's knees and sends him backwards onto his ass.

The thing uses its flipper to pull itself up Pyre's front, slipping and sliding and worming its way up, and it comes to a stop right over Pyre's heartbeat.

"Mama!" it shrieks. The voice sounds like dead souls crying out, it's some kind of sick-dread injector of sound coupled with the appearance of animated monster refuse, and Pyre has no idea what to do with it other than be absolutely terrified.

"Tilde can't know," Pyre says. The thing burbles against his chest and again coos "Mama" with its hundreds of screaming voices uniting as one.

Shanks comes back out of Russo's room holding the eyeball gingerly in one hand. He juggles it a little, tries to pick off a piece of lint from the pupil.

The creature squeals against Pyre's shirt. Pyre feels like his muscles are going to snap like brittle twigs, they're so tense.

"Come on, lets get this back into you," Shanks says to it. He leans over and tries to push the eyeball back into the creature's head. The opening it rolled out from is sealed over, the skin is resistant to Shanks' overtures.

"Kid, take your damn eye back," Shanks growls, and it pops back into the thing's head instantly.

The creature rolls its eye around in its socket, blinks rapidly, then fixes its gaze on Pyre's face.

"Mama," it gurgles.

Shanks says, "Good, okay," and runs back into the hotel room. He opens Pyre's closet and pulls out a pair of hobnails, crams his feet into them. "I'm borrowing these."

Pyre sits up, the thing clings to his shirt like a limpet. "But those are mine!"

Shanks picks up his trench coat from the floor as he staggers out of the room. He walks past Pyre, heads toward the lift, eyeballs the creature latched to Pyre's front as he passes. "Yeah, not my style at all. Come on, get up. We need to get out of this fucking place."

**# # # #**

The backroom of the Geraldine Rosemary Titty Showcase is dusty and full of cardboard boxes stacked along the walls. Most are marked "HOLIDAY: LEPREASSES" and "HOLIDAY: SAINT FANNY'S DAY". Pyre would be heavily offended by his surroundings if he wasn't busy staring at the creature from his hotel room shower. It's still attached to his front, wiggling around but clinging fast to his shirt.

The mouth part hasn't opened again, at least. Hopefully if he doesn't frighten it or offend it or make any sudden movements, it won't eat him.

Shanks comes back in from the door leading to the club proper. There's some kind of mariachi music playing loudly, a flashing red light, the heavy smell of cigar smoke. He closes the door behind him, and all of it is gone.

"The day they decided to cut back on live acts was a sad one for me," Shanks says. He comes to a stop in the centre of the room, puts his hands on his hips and narrows his eyes at the creature in Pyre's lap. His light brown skin looks darker in the dim light, but also now has a sheen of glitter.

"You look like a stripper put out to pasture," Pyre mumbles, averting his eyes from the man's naked torso. He's still wearing the damn coat.

Shanks grins and sits down right there on the floor. A plume of dust rises from the concrete as soon as his arse hits it. "You're complimenting me again."

"I have never complimented you in my life!" Pyre snaps. The monster shifts and raises its head, blinks its one eye at his face. He freezes.

"Stop looking like you're gonna piss, man," Shanks says, distant. He tugs off one of the boots he stole from Pyre's closet, inspects the open wounds on his feet. They're still sluggishly bleeding.

"These boots are ruined," Shanks says, peering inside said boot. He doesn't sound sorry at all.

Pyre grinds his teeth in lieu of a response.

The creature twists around in his lap. Its still holding on to him, but the eye is focused on Shanks on the floor three feet away.

Shanks hasn't noticed yet. He hauls off the second boot, which sends splatters of blood and fresh scabs all over the concrete.

"Doesn't that hurt?" Pyre finds himself asking.

Shanks shrugs and peers inside that one too. Then he grins at the creature and waggles the boot at it.

The thing goes still, doesn't blink.

"Hey, kiddo," Shanks croons. "Give mama a break and come play with me."

"You sound like a playground predator," Pyre says. He'll object to the title of "mama" at a later date, when he's less likely to be eaten for breathing wrong.

"I'd have to have a puppy too, then, wouldn't I?" Shanks arranges himself so he's sitting cross-legged on the floor with the boots in front of him. He grins at the creature and arranges the boots so they're pointing their toes at Pyre.

The creature jerks, then freezes again. The grip on Pyre's shirt doesn't feel so tense, like the fabric is relaxing along with the monster attached to it. He wonders if he should try to put the thing down.

Shanks must figure out what he's thinking, because he says sharply, "Let it get down on its own," then refocuses on the creature.

"Hey, little one," Shanks sing-songs. He nudges the left boot an inch away from himself, an inch closer to the monster. "Want to come play?"

The creature seems tentatively determined, if such a thing is possible. It wiggles away from Pyre, releases his shirt and slides down Pyre's legs to land heavy on the floor. It whimpers on impact.

"You okay, kid?" Shanks asks it. "That probably hurt, but at least you got down, huh? You can take care of yourself, if you can get down on your own."

The monster wraps a flipper around Pyre's right calve, gentle, then releases and slowly slips away, uses a wiggling motion on its undercarriage to get from Pyre across the three feet to Shanks and the boots.

Progress is slow, but it gets there and promptly sucks up the left boot into its maw with a wet pop.

"You hungry, huh?" Shanks asks.

The creature shoves the second boot into its mouth with a loud sucking noise. Shanks props his elbow on one knee and drops his chin into his hand to watch.

"You haven't got anything to wear now," Pyre points out. He feels weary.

"I'll borrow something off one of the girls," Shanks says, dismissive. He's grinning at the monster. Pyre can't see the thing's face, but he imagines there's quite a bit of mutual appreciation society function planning going on without words between those two.

"Why are you smiling at a murderous creature?" Pyre asks. He's not really interested in the answer.

Said creature wobbles in place, makes a loud _urp_ noise, and spits up the two boots all at once into Shanks' lap.

Shanks' reaction is to pick one up and look inside it.

The creature makes the _urp_ sound again, then vomits up a withered hand severed just below the wrist with a sparkling gold intricate rolex still on it. That lands in Shanks' lap too.

Pyre feels as if he's about to be ill. He wraps his arms around his middle and breathes as slowly and as evenly as possible.

"Shit, you okay kid?" Shanks asks. He puts the boots next to him, shoves the hand off to the side and leans close to the creature's head, focused on its face.

"Don't get too close," Pyre hisses between a deliberate inhale and exhale.

Shanks waves a distracted hand at him. To the creature, he says, "Stinky feet don't sit well on your tummy, do they?"

The monster burbles and makes a gagging noise. It inches closer to Shanks.

"Hey, you know what makes me feel better?" Shanks grins at it, it stops worming around to focus on him. "Singing! Singing makes me feel great!"

"Jazz standards are a bit too complex for an infant monster, methinks," Pyre snipes weakly, crosses his arms.

Shanks shoots him a look over the monster's head. "Will you cool it?"

He returns focus to the monster. "Okay, hey. Repeat after me, right?"

The creature says, "Riiiiigh," and wiggles in place.

"Great green gobs greasy grimy gopher guts," Shanks sing-songs.

"Greeeem gop gop gop," the monster says after him.

"Mutilated monkey meat!"

"Moootimon mee!"

"Itsy bitsy birdy feet!"

"Moooti monk mee!"

"And me without my spoon!" Shanks finishes with a flourish.

"Meeeee moooti monkeee mee!" the creature imitates.

"You're Mutilated Monkey Meat?" Shanks asks. His grin is massive on his face.

"Monkeee Mee!" The creature warbles at him.

"What do you know, the kid's got a name," Shanks says to Pyre. He gently places his hand on the kid's head. "Monkey Meat, the little princess."

Pyre startles in his seat. " _Princess_?"

Shanks gives him a flat look. "She's a pretty princess, obviously."

A beat of silence while Pyre parses that. Then, "I think there's something wrong with you, Langston."

The creature goes _urk_ and spits up a doorknocker that looks like it came off a convent in Medieval England.

Shanks picks it up and inspects it. "This looks old." He pulls the knocker away from the plate and the hinges break apart instantly, leaving him with two separate pieces.

Pyre rolls his eyes. "We need to find out what it is, and then we can figure out--" He scratches at his scalp, it itches like the Dickens with the mixture of dried booze sweat and dust that's settled in the roots of his hair. "We can figure out how to deal with it."

It's Shanks' turn to roll his eyes. "No shit."

Pyre glares at Shanks, still scratching. "A friend once had a pooka follow him around, and once he found out what it was he could take care of the thing. I _do_ have a reasoning behind this."

"Does Monkey Meat look like a pooka to you?" Shanks jerks his head at the creature wiggling on the concrete floor.

"Pooka are invisible," Pyre sniffs.

The thing starts to waggle its growing flaps, crows "Pooka pooka poo!" like the rattling chains of the dead in limbo.

Shanks pats it on its head, says, "What do you know, your momma _can_ get the point on the first try! It's a god damn miracle, kid!"

Pyre grits his teeth, bites back what he assumes are devastating and horrendous words that would rend Shanks' ego in two. So instead he goes to the next step in his tentative plan. "We should call Tilde."

Shanks goes still, then withdraws his hand and cocks his head. He looks like a dog when he does that. Pyre wants to hit him.

"You still on that, huh?"

"I think it's our only _sane_ option."

"We could always go on the run," Shanks offers. "You and me, the kid. Riding the rails and feeding her hobos too sickly to continue on."

"You are a disgusting individual," Pyre says, fascinated despite himself. "Do you ever listen to yourself talk?"

The infant monster makes a distressed noise, wobbles fully into Shanks' lap. He goes "oof" at the things' weight.

"Your cell, your call," he says, patting the thing on the head.

Pyre goes pale. "Are you sure about that? Why don't you call?"

"My phone's back in the room." Shanks grins at him, waggles his eyebrows. The man's normally wavy hair is sticking up all over the place, he looks like an idiot.

Pyre can't argue with the man, though he wants to. He rifles through his pockets until he produces a three-year old model of phone that he desperately did not want to purchase but had to because his ten year old model exploded on the metro.

Tilde's mobile is number three on his speed dial. He doesn't want to think about what numbers one and two are, it involves takeaway curry and he's already hungry enough as is.

They pick up on the second ring with a low growl of " _what_?"

"Uh, Tilde?"

"Can you please tell Mister Shanks that I have his clothing in my possession and a box of matches, compliments of the hotel staff?"

Pyre pulls the cell away and looks at Shanks. "She's going to burn your clothes."

Shanks shrugs and rests his chin on top of the creature's head. It flutters its eyelids and burbles.

Pyre puts the phone back to his ear. "He's unconcerned. How did you know he was with me?"

"He's _always_ with you when we're at Competition," Tilde snarls. Pyre raises his eyebrows and glances at Shanks again, who is now poking at where the thing's nose would be if it where human and making it giggle out a sound that imitates two rusty chains rubbing together.

"Right, well, we've got a problem."

"Don't say? I'm setting the clothing on fire now, by the way."

"Of course you are. Do you happen to know anyone in the area who can assist in matter of monstrosity?"

Tilde's breath hitches, the sound of crackling comes over the line. "Did trolls come and steal you two away?"

"Not quite." Pyre watches Shanks tickle the creature under the mouth area. It wiggles and makes a noise like those same chains breaking, link by link. "There was a large egg in my shower that hatched. We've quite stuck with the thing now, I'd like a consultation in order to get rid of it."

The crackling over the phone is louder. Tilde curses, a faucet cranks, and the distorted roar of water makes Pyre's ears hurt.

Tilde must step out of the bathroom then because the noise dims quickly. They cough a bit over the line.

"You don't know what it _is_?"

"No?"

"Brilliant. I wake up alone, there's a murder going on in the hotel so I can't leave, and you've got yourself attached to something that you don't even know what it _is_."

Pyre doesn't reply, though he does hunch his shoulders. Their tone has taken a tinge of irritation that he's quite familiar with.

"I'll find you something when I can get out of here," they say, after a moment's pause. "Can you two keep out of trouble before then? Stay away from unicorns, don't get cursed by an angry djinn in the meantime, hmm?"

"We'll do our best," Pyre mumbles.

Tilde laughs shortly and hangs up on him.

"Tilde's looking for an address, they'll text when they've got something." He grimaces at Shanks. "I think they really did burn all of your clothing, however."

"It was just a shirt and some crappy boots," Shanks shrugs. He holds up his hand to the monster.

It tentatively touches both its flippers to his palm and he whoops out a laugh.

**# # # #**

A cab vomits Shanks and Pyre out onto the sidewalk in front of a narrow detached Victorian house with gingerbread trim. The porch is painted a canary yellow, and Tilde sits on the bench next to the open front door as they wait for them.

The two men look scattered and rumpled and they're carrying something in Shanks' coat, leaving him shirtless. Tilde had hoped he'd found a shirt elsewhere than the one left on the floor of their room, but apparently no such luck.

"I brought your cellular," Tilde calls. Lifts the phone into the air as demonstration. "But you're not getting it back until I say so."

Pyre holds on to Shanks' bundled coat. It looks like it's squirming. That must be the creature, then.

Shanks leans down to pay the cabbie through the passenger window and waves a hand at Tilde without bothering to look around. The cabbie gives him a dirty look; probably because of all the chest hair he's getting a liberal eyeful of.

Pyre wobbles his way up the steps onto the porch proper and sits down next to Tilde. The coat is indeed squirming. He has his arms locked around the thing to keep it from falling to the floor.

" _Him_? Really?" he says, watching Shanks snarl at the cabbie. The cabbie waves a fist at him and snarls back.

"Androgynous does not mean asexual," Tilde sniffs. They fiddle with Shanks' phone in their hands. "And besides, hate sex is quite fun when--"

Pyre slaps his hands over his ears and loudly hums the national anthem of Russia.

The coat wiggles and worms, Tilde sees a flash of something not quite pitch black but not merrily light in colour either, then Pyre grabs it again to stop it from rolling off his lap.

"Well, let's see the thing then," Tilde says. Shanks is coming up the walk, the cabbie speeding off into the distance.

"I told him if he wanted to take my shirt he was out of luck," Shanks announces as he climbs onto the porch.

Pyre slides down a bit of Shanks' trench, and a little head with one open eye and a lumpy formation everywhere else blinks at the light.

"Oh dear," Tilde says. They feel faint just looking at it. "That was in your _shower_?"

"She was an egg, first," Shanks offers.

"Yes, it was in my shower," Pyre says. He leans his head away from it, clonks the back of his skull against the wood siding on the house. "And now it won't leave me alone. It got off my lap for a minute when I called you, but now it refuses to let go again."

"Oh dear," Tilde says. Shanks coughs, raps his knuckles on the porch railing.

"You're making it sound like she's heavy or something." He grins at Tilde. "She's fine, just takes some getting used to."

Pyre glares at Shanks, while Shanks serenely stares back.

Tilde stands up and sidesteps to the door leading into the house. "That thing is female?"

"It's some kind of monster," Pyre says. He stands too, juggles the thing in his arms so he doesn't drop it. Shanks takes a step towards him, hand outstretched towards the creature. "Langston just has an issue with subjective standards of beauty."

Shanks barks out a laugh and touches the creature on the head. It leans into his hand like a cat would.

Right. They've had enough of this. Tilde opens the screen door and enters the house. Shanks follows, still laughing, and Pyre takes up the rear with the creature. Except as soon as he takes one step past the threshold, the thing starts to wail like fingernails on a chalkboard.

Pyre stops cold and affects an expression of pure horror. Shanks shoves him out the door back outside and the thing goes silent immediately.

"What's wrong with it?" Tilde asks. They realise that they're hugging themselves around the middle, force their arms down to their sides.

Pyre shakes his head. "I don't know it just--"

"It's these things," Shanks says. He pokes a cluster of brass bells that hang over the door frame. They jingle under his attentions.

"Please do not disturb my charms," a frail male voice calls from the next room. "It upsets me."

Shanks stops jabbing at the bells and looks at Tilde. They shrug.

"Okay," he drawls. He looks at the creature poking its head out of the jacket and the eye rolling around in its socket. "Okay, you stay here with the little gal, we'll be right back."

He takes a step away and the monster whimpers. Shanks pauses on his way to Tilde, turns back.

"I'll stay in sight, okay? Just stay there."

Pyre murmurs an "all right, then." Shanks shoves Tilde at the shoulder and they both go down the hall to the open door that leads to The Office of Dick Burton, Prime Occultist.

An older man sits behind a small table in the dark room. He's got rumbled paper skin, liver spots all up and down his neck, and white hair that looks like spun sugar.

"Mister Burton, hello," Tilde says, offering a hand.

His fish-belly white hand grips Tilde's strongly, then drops it like a leper drops body parts. "I hear something horrid on my porch. What is it?"

"She's not _horrible_ , come on," Shanks says from the doorway. He gestures back at the screeching thing, and amazingly enough, it quiets.

Tilde waves a hand at Shanks. "We need your volume of knowledge to impart some information, please."

Burton disregards Tilde with a flick of fingers. They try not to grit their teeth in frustration, but it's a close thing.

Shanks shoots them a look, then says to Burton, "My friend found a huge ass egg in his hotel shower. It rolled around a lot, kinda felt spongy to the touch he said. When it hatched it took out a wall, then got hungry and ate a dude."

Tilde stares at Shanks.

"That _thing_ ate someone?"

"Describe the creature," Burton commands over Tilde's shout.

Shanks' lips quirk. "Well he deserved it," he says to Tilde, then to Burton, "Big lump of solid seaweed with an eye on the top. Got a mouth somewhere up there too, small teeth, it just sucks things in or spits them out. Little flippers on the sides, kind of cute."

Tilde only saw the upper half of the creature, and none of it was cute. They make a strangled noise to infer that fact.

"Does it speak?" Burton asks. His face hasn't changed one bit, it's frozen in mild indifference like a stone cast from a really snooty Roman sculpture.

"Yeah, her syllables sound like something dying, but she can repeat stuff."

Burton hums, selects one of three books on the table before him, and opens it at random.

"What's going on?" Pyre shouts from the porch.

Shanks tilts his head back to look down the hall. He bellows, "I'M TAKING CARE OF IT," then leans back to give Burton his attention.

Tilde smiles weakly at Burton. He raises an eyebrow but doesn't stop skimming a page in his book.

"A being of supreme evil," Burton announces. He closes the heavy tome with a snap. "Ancient and anointed."

Shanks leans against the door frame, cocks his head. "You sure about that? She's pretty harmless."

Burton raises an eyebrow. "You said it ate a person."

"Yeah, I did." Shanks grins at him.

Tilde pinches the skin between their eyes and exhales through their teeth. "What do we do about it?"

"Not your problem, Tilly," Shanks says.

Tilde turns to glare at him. He puts up his hands in surrender.

"This larva of an Ancient One has The Abyss inside it. The Abyss can only be utilised if the vessel has gained power." Burton skims his pointer finger across the cover of the closed book in front of him then inspects it for dust. "Give it a name, you've given it power. Never name it, and it shall die without ever reaching a modicum of its intended potential."

"Got all that from my crap description, did ya?" Shanks drawls.

Burton looks up at Shanks, dead serious. "It shan't be worshipped, it will never grow."

Silence settles in the room. Tilde rubs their face and wishes they were anywhere else than here. Maybe back home in England. Or somewhere else, somewhere with sun and far, far away from these people.

Shanks coughs and crosses his arms. "Yeah man, I doubt there'll be a legion of the faithful lining up to pay tribute to Monkey Meat."

Tilde freezes. So does Burton.

"You've named the evil incarnate," Burton says flatly.

"Ah-yup." Shanks nods.

"You named what is essentially a _god_ , "Monkey Meat"."

"That's an affirmative."

Burton narrows his eyes, curls his lip into a snarl.

"Get out of my house."

"Hallo?" Pyre shouts from out on the porch. "What's he saying?"

**# # # #**

The yellow cab is full of three adults and one Ancient Evil. Tilde won't turn their head from the window, and Shanks is starting to feel frustrated. They passed the gates into the Airport proper a minute ago, and he's running out of time.

Monkey Meat shifts under Shanks' trench coat. Pyre wraps his arms tighter around her, laces his fingers together to keep it still.

"You know, some children are just destructive. Doesn't mean it has to ruin a perfectly fine polygamous relationship," the cabbie says. He's rather jovial for someone who has to combat traffic all day, and Shanks is pretty sure he's nuts, to boot.

"No shit, man," Shanks says, just to be friendly, then tries to talk sense to Tilde again again. "Come on, I don't see--"

"You don't see?" Tilde snaps. They're still not looking at him, but he can see the planes of their sharp features in the window's reflection. Tilde's always had thin lips, but right now they're almost nonexistent.

"I'm just saying that--"

"No good," Pyre says softly as Tilde whips their head around to level the stink eye on Shanks.

"There's no _just saying_ about it!" They poke a finger at Shanks' collarbone. He's very glad they aren't wearing their nails long this week. "This is your problem. You could have walked away and let someone else, someone _qualified_ take care of it, but no. You had to _carry it with you_. Take some damn responsibility, Langston!"

"Oh he's Langston now, is he?" Pyre sneers.

Tilde directs the glare to the other man and does a bit of snarling there, too. "Do. Not. Start. _Marvin_."

Pyre swallows and slides lower into the seat.

"It's always like this with expanding families," The cabbie says. His eyes are literally twinkling in the rearview mirror, Shanks wonders if he's on Angel Dust or something. "Hormones rise, fall, rise again. Like the tide of forever in the gate of heaven."

Tilde turns back to the window and jams their shoulder violently into the back of the seat. "I'm going back to England and there isn't a damn thing you can do about it."

The cab rolls to a stop behind a line of cars waiting at the Airport Terminal.

"Best wait until we're closer to the door, love," the cabbie says.

Tilde jerks their head in acknowledgement.

"You're easily the smartest person I know," Pyre says. He sounds plaintive, and it is Shanks' turn to shake his head, mouth "no good" at him.

"What does that have to do with anything, hmm?" Tilde asks. Their voice has taken on a nasty edge. "When you clearly have the sense of poorly trained small claims barrister thinking he's about to enter the courts to defend a _hamster_."

Shanks looks at Pyre. Pyre looks at Shanks.

"All the more reason for you to stay and help us sort this out?" Pyre tries. The cab inches forward as two cars leave the line simultaneously.

"I'd rather be elsewhere while you learn to _take responsibility_ and _take care of it yourselves_ ," Tilde snarls at the window.

Another three cars leave the line, and the cabbie stops right in front of the line of sliding glass doors leading into the airport terminal. Tilde has the door open and is hauling themselves out before the car stops fully.

Tilde slams the door behind them, whirls around and glares at Shanks.

Shanks does nothing to take the vacated seat, he wants to be out of range of more poking fingers if it comes to that.

"Give me a ring when you've _both_ regained sanity. Not one of you. _Both of you_." They whirl around stomp into the building.

"Don't worry. She'll come around," the cabbie says. He's watching them bulldoze their way into the terminal with a smile, and Shanks doesn't have the energy needed to correct the guy about Tilde's gender.

"Good digs, man," Shanks says. He ignores Pyre, slides over an inch but not quite into the seat Tilde vacated. "Can you take us to the Block Hotel near the Competition Arena now? We gotta get our shit."

The cabbie nods and merges back into traffic, leaves the airport behind.

**# # # #**

Shanks is surprised that the train station is this full of people, but he's not going to look a gift horse in the mouth. He chances a glance at Pyre, who looks like he's about to vomit as he holds Monkey Meat to his chest under a blanket embroidered with cartoon trains.

Shanks has the bags. He offered to carry the little one instead, but she refused to let go of Pyre's shirt and the man's terror at upsetting her was enough for Shanks to stop pulling and just lead the way into the station instead of continuing the argument.

A gaggle of teenage girls giggle at them as they pass. Shanks grins at them automatically, but doesn't pay much attention. He's wearing his travelling shirt and has a pair of his own boots now. Even Pyre can't call him an ageing stripper now.

Not that he's really _old_ or anything. He could be a stripper if he wanted to. He's forty, that's not too old to strut around and get money stuck to his crotch.

There's a train at the platform to their left, and Shanks thinks that might be the one they have tickets for. He called the station while Pyre sneaked into his room to grab his things, arranged for his credit card to be pushed to the max just for two adults and a child.

Next to the train he's eyeballing there is a group of women wearing floral print muumuus and sandals that look like they might be tourists on their way Down South. The straw-woven hats lend credence to this theory of his.

"Are we all together?" Shanks asks, then winces. He sounds like a teacher leading a field trip to the zoo. He glances at the tourists again and stops feeling guilty about the zoo part.

"Is this really the best action to take?" Pyre asks. He sticks out like a sore thumb in his glitter pants and heeled boots, but at least his hair is combed now. Man looks like shit with bedhead, as Shanks has most recently figured out.

Shanks shrugs and peers at the platform number on a nearby pillar. It says seven. Are they supposed to be at seven? "If you got any other idea on how to evade trouble, I'll listen."

He grins at Pyre. "This is a democratic pair of daddies this kid has, you know?"

Pyre's pallor goes from pale to flushed in no time at all, and he glares at Shanks with mean intent. Shanks cackles to himself and pulls the ticket out of his inside jacket pocket to look at it.

Monkey Meat starts to worm a bit under the blanket, makes a small cry like a family of mice dying.

Shanks finds the platform number-- yup, seven, they're in the right place-- and stuffs it back into his pocket before reaching out and patting the head area of Monkey Meat's blanket.

The intercom in the station crackles to life, bellows "PLATFORM SEVEN NOW BOARDING. GREENWOOD CITY STATION TO NEW ORLEANS."

A herd of muumuus and straw hats converge upon the train. Shanks tugs at Pyre's shirt at the shoulder and jerks his head towards their transportation.

"It'll be fine, come on," he says with a grin.


	3. earth time a go go time 3/6

The house Shanks found for them costs a meagre four hundred a month, utilities included. He doesn't expect much, but to be honest, he _did_ expect more than this. Pyre's nose is in a perpetual scrunch as he stands in the middle of the empty living room. There's a crack down the middle of the far wall, letting in light from the outside.

"Well," Shanks tries, stops. Looks around at the crumbling kitchen, the black mold growing on the ceiling, the window's glass so crusted with dirt it's a yellowy brown colour. Tries again, "It's, a..."

Monkey Meat's outside, smacking at the rotting planks that make up the porch.

"It's certainly remote," Pyre says. He stares at the dust on the floor. "If the monster goes insane and kills us, no one will be around as casualties. Besides ourselves, of course."

"Her name is Monkey Meat and she's not gonna kill us," Shanks insists. He leaves the kitchen, sidesteps the little mountain of their bags that he dumped in the middle of the floor, and leaves through the front door.

" _It_ might," Pyre insists, following him. "And I don't see why you persist in giving the thing a gender, I read on the train that Ancient Evils aren't anything at all, which might be a direct correlation between how people treat Tilde."

Shanks listens with half an ear, too busy looking around. The dirt road goes straight out to the main drag, a two lane cracked asphalt afterthought that the cabbie who brought them out here swore at the entire way down. The house is surrounded by trees, and he _knows_ there are people somewhere out there in other houses just as bad as this one, but he can't _see_ them so it's a hard enough thought to grasp.

Monkey Meat wiggles her way down one step, then two, then out onto the packed dirt that makes a driveway. She slaps at the ground now and coos at the different consistency.

Shanks bites back a grin. Pyre comes to stand next to him, arms crossed and shoulders hunched.

"How long can we survive out here, with _that_?" Pyre asks, jerking his chin at Monkey Meat. "I have two hundred pounds left to my name, you have less."

Shanks rubs at his mouth, watches Monkey Meat wobble and roll her way towards the edge of the driveway where the marshy swamp dirt starts. The kid can't go far, but he's going to keep a good eye on her anyway.

"I've played clubs around here before," he says, stepping off the porch to go after Monkey Meat, "and I'll play them again. Good nights with the drunks can get us over three hundred anyway."

Monkey Meat's picking up speed, is just at the edge of the drive now. Shanks hot foots it to the kid, grabs her up and holds her close before the stupid kid falls into the swamp. He grins at Pyre., who is squinting at them.

"I'll fix the furniture problem, and we'll eat okay," he promises. Monkey Meat looks up at him with her one unblinking eye, then blows a raspberry.

Shanks laughs at the kid, and does his damnedest to ignore Pyre's frown.

"Don't you have a house of your own somewhere? Why are we _here_ instead?"

Shanks bounces Monkey Meat around a bit. The kid giggles and squeals, sounds like a hog being slaughtered. "I haven't had a permanent place to live since the early nineties, man."

Pyre grits his teeth and pinches the bridge of his nose, eyes closed and exhale roaring through his nostrils.

**# # # #**

Shanks sings into the microphone that is shoddily mounted on top of the bar's piano. The drunkards are humming along, the people who aren't drunk are watching with wide eyes.

" _I'm waiting for the rush and the smack,_  
_For the impact of that really toothsome trap,_  
_You get my jawbone already, boil the meat from the bone_  
_And I'm never gonna run away, run away home._ "

He takes his feet off the pedals and hits the C sharp, letting it linger while he climbs off the stage. The drunks whoop and holler him off. A group of scantily clad bleached blonds are looking scandalised with their bread bowls full of gumbo before them on their table.

At a table all the way in the back sitting kitty-corner to the room is Pyre. Next to him, down low on a padded seat, is Monkey Meat in a nest of Shanks' jacket and a baby blanket they found at St. Vincent's Thrift Shop while they were searching for basic furniture to haul back to the house.

Shanks stops at the bartender on his way over, is handed a thin stack of cash and gets a handshake, two fingers of whiskey in a glass for his trouble. He knocks back the booze as he meanders over to the table.

He slumps into the chair on the other side of Monkey Meat and he leans down to place a wet smack on the top of the creature's head. Monkey Meat burbles and wiggles in its sleep as response.

"How much for tonight?" Pyre asks.

"Three hundred." Shanks hands over the stack of twenties. It looks much larger to hold than to see it across the room. "I'll get the same if I come in tomorrow too."

"I'm beginning to see the virtue of being a solo artist," Pyre mumbles. He pockets the money and focuses on his bread bowl of chowder. "You should eat something too," he says, idle and not at all concerned.

"Gumbo on its way out." Shanks winks at him, slides sideways to put his arm across the back of Pyre's chair and leave his torso hovering over Monkey Meat. His head is lower than Pyre's now, too. His eyes are atrociously brown in the sunlight, but in this dim room they look like a kind of abyss.

"Wrote that song for you," Shanks murmurs, grin sly on his face.

"You don't even like me," Pyre says, faint.

"Nah, I've always liked you, you've just tolerated me." And Shanks leans up to press his mouth against Pyre's cheek, his sticky mouth of whiskey against the scratch and dryness of Pyre's unshaven face.

Shanks' mouth is like a brand, and Pyre doesn't know what to do about it. Monkey Meat mewls like a dying cat and says "Mama." Shanks pulls away and hoists the waking creature into his lap.

"You're supposed to be my wingman, girlie," he says to Monkey Meat. He avoids meeting Pyre's eyes, focuses on the Ancient Evil wiggling around.

Pyre takes another bite of gumbo and stares at the table.

**# # # #**

Shanks jerks out of a sound sleep and falls off the kitchen table onto the brown tiled floor, lands hard with his left shoulder leading. He groans, rolls onto his back and blinks the stars out of his eyes.

Pyre shouts again, something like "NO, STOP IT." There is a thump in Monkey Meat's room followed by heavy running footsteps.

Shanks watches the doorway to the kitchen, and Pyre's stocking feet enter. He's wearing orange socks. Or are they faded red. He screws his eyes shut and forces himself to breathe out his nose. Christ, his shoulder hurts.

Pyre stomps around the table and kicks Shanks in the thigh until he opens his eyes. Monkey Meat is holding on tightly to Pyre's shirt, and it looks like the material is pulled taught by the grip.

"Help!" Pyre shouts, kicks Shanks again.

"What? What's going on?" Shanks sits up and leans out of the way of Pyre's flailing leg.

Pyre leans down and shouts in his face, "Stop sitting there and help!"

Shanks winces at the volume, his head is ringing now. He looks at Monkey Meat, holds his hands up to touch her, and oh. Monkey Meat's mouth is firmly affixed to Pyre's shirt. The reason the fabric is pulled taught is because the kid is literally hoovering the shirt up while Pyre still wears it.

Shanks says, "Okay, okay," and Pyre takes a step back so Shanks can get up.

They have kitchen shears in the drawer next to the sink. Shanks gets them and tries to carefully snip through the seams of Pyre's shirt without cutting flesh. Monkey Meat wobbles and mumbles, an upset sound that causes Shanks actual alarm.

He gets one side up to the armpit done, and the loose fabric is sucked down Monkey Meat's throat like a flash. Shanks runs around behind Pyre to the other side and cuts faster up that seam to get the entire shirt to fall away. He steps back to leave Pyre in the middle of the kitchen bare chested and sweating, ribs sticking out and looking like a war crimes victim holding on to a baby to protect it.

Pyre shoves Monkey Meat into Shanks' arms and steps back to the opposite wall with his arms crossed.

Shanks pats Monkey Meat on the back, a "there there" motion, then sets the kid on the kitchen table and leans down to look her in the eye.

"Monkey Meat, hey, no look at me." He reaches out and uses his hand gently on the kid's head to make her meet Shanks' gaze. "You shouldn't do that to Marv, okay?"

Monkey Meat tries to look away again, but Shanks holds her firm. "No, you keep looking at me. That wasn't good, you could've hurt mama. Do you want to hurt mama?"

Monkey Meat whimpers and rolls her eye around in the socket. Around the whimpering is the word "nooooooooo," which Shanks accepts and lets go of the kid's head.

"What happened?" he asks Pyre, who has finally turned around.

"I think it grew as it slept and broke the crib," Pyre says. He rubs his hands together as if to warm them, despite it being a muggy 93 Fahrenheit outside. "I was putting away the blankets when it fell right through."

Shanks frowns. He raises his hand and puts it flat on Monkey Meat's side. It covers only half of the kid's body, used to span most of it.

Well shit. She _is_ growing.

**# # # #**

Pyre finds an advertisement for a voodoo and magicks service that by phone or in-face consultation can offer advice, magical interference, and products to the general public. In the corner is a shoddily printed photo of the founder wearing the usual Psychic Garb with a grim but knowledgeable look on her face.

The advert takes up a whole page in the phone book, faded colour print and a cartoon drawing of a voodoo doll over the logo that grins like Mickey Mouse. It's the only place with 24/7 hours, too.

Shanks doesn't argue when he shows it to him. Just says "After tonight's show, huh?" and gets Monkey Meat ready to go. The payout from the gig is over four hundred, and they leave the club at three to a called cab that drives them down dark streets to the Corporate Headquarters of Hexxx International. The building they end up at looks like a call centre with no windows and towering walls.

Shanks takes over paying the driver, so Pyre carries Monkey Meat inside and blinks at the fluorescent lighting.

"Walk in or appointment?" the secretary asks. She's got creole-dark skin, dyed red dreadlocks tumbling over her shoulders and is wearing a petal pink powersuit. There's a closed economics textbook on the desk next to the phone and computer monitor on her desk.

Pyre tries to smile, but then Shanks stumbles in after him swearing about asshole cabbies.

"Walk in, please," he says over Shanks' slurring.

The secretary wrinkles her nose at Shanks. The man doesn't notice, he's too busy trying to get the cellophane wrapping off his pack of cigarettes.

"What type of business, please?" she asks Pyre.

"Advice regarding an unknown creature," he says. He pulls back the blanket over Monkey Meat so she can see the head. It blinks sleepy in the light, grumbles out a sound like a backfiring semi.

She's nonplussed in the way she picks up her desk phone and punches one of the buttons on the side. "Yeah, that thing you foresaw is here," she says into the handset.

"The atmosphere is uncanny here," Shanks drawls. He tickles Monkey Meat under the chin and misses Pyre narrowing his eyes at him.

The secretary hangs up the phone and waves her hand at the closed door leading further into the building. "Go in there, someone will meet you." Job done, she goes back to whatever she was doing on the computer with a dismissive flick of her hair over her shoulder.

"Thanks for the help," Pyre says. He might sound a bit sarcastic, to his own ears. He bites back saying anything else and follows Shanks through the doors.

A short black woman, dark and with delicate cheekbones, is wearing a floral-print headwrap and jean shorts to go with her flouncy poet's shirt.

"I'm Aida Vaas, and I'll be telling you your shit today," she greets. She's not looking at either of them, she's watching the bundle of Monkey Meat in Pyre's arms with a wariness he didn't expect.

"Saw you in the phone book," Shanks says. She quirks an eyebrow and turns to lead them down the hall, into a middling-sized room off to the left with no windows and that has a small circle-top glass table in the middle.

"You were wearing a lot more stereotypical scarves," Shanks continues.

"White tourists," Vaas says with a shrug. She steps around so they're on one side of the table, their backs to the door, and she's alone on the other side, her back to a series of massive tables with dried plants hanging from the ceiling and scattered papers, potted plants over everything else.

"Now, what do you want to know today?" she asks.

"You tell us, lady," Shanks says. He's got his shoulders squared, he looks hostile.

" _Langston_ ," Pyre hisses at him.

"I could tell you your business, but I'm not the one holding a monster close to my heart," she says evenly to Shanks.

"And I'm not the one running a tourist trap," Shanks bites out. Pyre glares at him, but the other man doesn't notice, he's too busy sneering at Vaas.

The woman grins wide, flutters her eyelashes. "Glad we can be up front with one another, Uncle Tom."

Shanks blinks, then tosses his head back to bark out a laugh.

Vaas transfers her focus onto Pyre, and by extension, Monkey Meat.

"We've been told that its an ancient evil," he says. He stammers as he talks to this woman, for some reason. "But there has been no advice on forming a solution."

"I've seen evil come and go," she mumbles as she tilts her head to look the creature in the eye. "It don't flourish often."

Monkey Meat whimpers under her gaze, weakly holds a flipper out towards Shanks.

Shanks does what he does best; he pats Monkey Meat on the head, murmurs "It's okay, princess" in an audible but soft tone, and calms the creature down in less than ten seconds.

Vaas gets a look across her face of revulsion, then turns to her table covered in dried plants. She takes a brown clay plate from a cupboard and pulls off pinches of leaves from hanging plants, dried sprigs from seemingly random bunches to pile onto it.

"I'll burn this. Thing inhales the smoke and don't like it, we got something bad in our midst." She grabs a piece of newspaper, twists it in her fingers, then drops it on top of the herbs. Then she brings the whole mess back to the circle table in the centre of the room and puts the plate on it.  
"If it has no redeeming nature, it'll _hate_ this smoke," Vaas says, then pulls out a book of matches to fiddle with.

"So if I hate the smoke too?" Shanks drawls.

"Smell is good to Angels," she recites, "fairy folk who haven't drunk blood in the last year, the mirror ghouls, anything that hangs around in churches. And the forest ones, solid earth creatures like unicorns too."

"Are unicorns still around?" Pyre asks, surprised.

Vaas strikes a match. "They come and go, just like everything else," she says, and drops the lit match in the middle of the mass of herbs.

The newspaper catches fire first, and a thick plume of grey smoke rises from the plate. It smells and sounds like burning paper to Pyre. Even when the plants catch and the smell changes slightly, it's still nothing special, nothing he's never smelt already.

"Give me true nature, child, give me truth as ye know it," Vaas says in monotone with her hands folded flat over her stomach.

The smoke twists. It takes form. It goes _black_ , pitch and like an abyss.

An image of a figure forms, dark and covered with blinking yellow eyes and gaping mouths. Claws form on the sides attached to a million arms, the flickering fire of crushed lives licks the mass from the bottom. All the mouths open and the eyes stare, wide and powerful. The sound that comes out is akin to a drowning kitten, but gone _mean_ instead of victimised.

And Monkey Meat bleats out a wail right there in Pyre's arms so pitiful that before he knows what's going on Shanks has the monster away from him and is shushing it, pressing it close to his chest.

Vaas dashes the smoke with both of her hands, and the sound stops, the vision is gone.

"So you see why it doesn't like the smoke," she says after a moment to breathe.

"What's that supposed to mean?" Shanks snipes.

"It means you should get rid of it," Vaas snaps back. "Kill it if you can, abandon to nature if you can't. But _get rid of it_."

She takes the plate of burnt ash to her table and puts it on top of a towering stack of yellowing papers.

"Look, that thing is gonna grow with or without help," Vaas says, She places a clay plate over the burning mess of herbs, cuts the smoke off cold. "It'll keep going until it's big enough to devour the planet whole. The worshipping congregation is just a way to expedite the process."

Shanks looks critically at Monkey Meat. "You gonna be a big girl, huh?"

Pyre rolls his eyes and brings a hand to his own forehead.

Vaas is glaring at Shanks from over her worktable. "Gonna be harder to deal with if you make it personal. That's just regular smarts, don't need for the occult to know that."

Shanks gives her a dirty look, then turns and leaves the room.

"Pay the lady," he shouts over his shoulder at Pyre.

"So that's it, then?" he asks.

Vaas transfers her glare to Pyre.

"Yeah, Whitey. That's it," she sneers.

**# # # #**

Monkey Meat is easily amused. It stares without blinking out into the swamp's dank twilight to watch the Lagoon Men go about their business, and has been doing so for over an hour.

"Aren't there aboriginals here in America?" Pyre asks Shanks. "Some long-standing tribe with a shaman or medicine woman to speak to?"

Shanks rubs at the back of his own neck with both hands. "You're getting your ideas out of movies I think, man, but yeah, they got specific lots of land assigned to them. They're not happy with whites though, so you'd get told to beat it, and they'd be suspicious of me because I'm not native.

"Besides, I don't think they want to have much to do with anything considered _evil_." He drops his hands from his neck and starts to put on the jacket that was hanging over the porch railing in front of him. "Alaskans got these Eskimos, think they're called _Inuit_ now. They might be more congenial. But that's up in Alaska.

"Canada won't let the kid in, no way no how. They've got Natives up there too, somewhere. In the south Mexico has their natives, Aztec descendants and the like. I don't want to get caught in the crossfire between drug cartels, so even if that does hold a solution, the answer is no."

"So what you're saying," Pyre says into his hands, "is that it was a stupid idea."

Shanks adjusts the sleeves on his jacket and grins. "Yep."

"Dropping it off in some random copse of trees isn't on the table either, I presume."

Shanks shakes his head and steps into his boots. Kicks the heel against the porch to make them settle on his feet. "In Florida they have a grand old ritual of leaving snakes and other exotic pets out in the swamp they outgrow their cages. Pythons invade and go head to head with the alligators." He crouches down to do up the laces.

"It would probably be worshipped by those Lagoon creatures if we let it out here." Pyre watches the slow plodding movements of the Lagoon Men, these monsters who come out when the moon is up and throw shadows around as if they were men, but when you get up close you see tentacles and gills and directional fins instead of humanoid characteristics.

It's generally considered a good idea to stay away from them.

Monkey Meat waves at the aforementioned creatures and burbles out a word, sounds like " _Play_ ".

"We're not abandoning her, stop it," Shanks tells him. He glances at Monkey Meat, then stands up to lean in close to Pyre. "We'll figure it out if you quit panicking every five minutes, damnit."

Pyre glares at Shanks, and Shanks glares right back up. After a moment, they both look away simultaneously.

"How about Europe, then?" Pyre asks.

"We can't shove her on a plane in business class."

"I know that," Pyre throws up his hands. "But there simply must be a way. Perhaps a cargo plane? Or a cargo ship!"

Monkey Meat is waving both of its arms at the shadows of the Lagoon Men now. One of them goes still, then waves both of its human-looking arms back at it.

"Do we need to leave here? Is that what started this fit?"

"I'm not having a fit!"

Shanks rolls his eyes. "I haven't had my own place in years, but I can get in contact with some folks on the West Coast. We can head out to the Pacific Ocean."

"We won't be getting any more answers there than we get here, will we?" Pyre almost shouts. Monkey Meat tries to tip off the porch, Shanks grabs the creature and sets it back a foot from the edge before he looks at Pyre again.

"What about you?"

Pyre startles, says "What about me? What?"

"You got some place for us to hide in Ye Old Bonny England? Is that why you want to go there?"

"I was letting a room in Mayfair, actually." Pyre chews on the inside of his mouth to make the blood taste stay. "Tilde texted last week, she has my things."

Shanks raises his eyebrows and says nothing.

"Look, listen to me on this please. This country is so terribly staid," he says. He gestures with both hands at Monkey Meat, who is still waving at the Lagoon Men and giggling. Shanks mouths the word " _staid_ " like it amuses him, Pyre frowns. "Europe has far more acceptance of the occult than here, and possibly a solution we can actually use versus some driftwood theory of ultimate destruction that doesn't do us the slightest bit of good."

"I'd declare fighting words, but lucky for you I'm not patriotic," Shanks says. He leans against the crumbling rail on the porch and watches Monkey Meat. "So what are we gonna do? Call up your ex-fucktoy and ask to borrow the private jet?"

Pyre winces at the mention of Jack. "I will never call that man for anything ever again."

"And you like to be pissy about _my_ lovers," Shanks says with a grin. He crouches down next to Monkey Meat and tickles it on the side of its head, much to its delight. "Well, figure something out. Something we can _pay_ for, and we'll go."

Shanks looks up at him, face sober now and craggy-looking in the dim twilight.

"I'm not calling him," Pyre insists.

Shanks' eyebrows go up. "Then figure something else out."

He turns back to Monkey Meat and pokes it in the side. "I'm gonna go get us food money, you gonna be good for mama here?"

Pyre rubs his hands over his face. Monkey Meat coos out a "bye, bye, bye, bye bye bye" at Shanks, loud enough to almost echo against the swamp water.

**# # # #**

The house is dark when Shanks gets back. Better for all that it is, he doesn't feel like dealing with light switches tonight anyway.

He only made three hundred tonight. That's enough for two days of food with the squirt consuming enough resources to make the United States Agriculture Department weep into their tightfisted hands. He pulls out his wallet and dumps it onto the coffee table as he passes.

The door to the master bedroom is open, Pyre a lump in the centre of the mattress. Shanks leans against the frame and watches the man breathe.

Stupid man. Stupid him. Stupid everyone. He swears, sometimes the only smart one in this household is the alien creature who vacuums up muck from the swamp if she's not watched closely.

Shanks pushes off the frame and stumbles back to the living room. The shadows like to play tricks on him after he's had some whiskey, but he's wise to them and dances around the darkest ones on the floor. He falls face first onto the sofa, belches, winces at the aftertaste. It was cheap whiskey. Good thing it was free.

A heavy silence falls over the house as he settles in. His mouth is sour and will taste like hell took up residence in the morning, the space between his eyes will hurt to match it, but for the moment he's fuzzy and warm and only annoyed at the world just a little bit.

There's a wet sucking noise somewhere. Shanks opens his eyes. His wallet sitting alone and at the edge of the coffee table is blurry, then comes to focus.

The sucking noise is somewhere behind him, muffled but defined enough that he just _knows_ what it is.

He scrambles off the sofa, bangs his knee on the coffee table. His wallet lands on the floor with a slap, he ignores it and limps out of the living room, to the closed door to Monkey Meat's room.

That door shouldn't be closed. They never close it, in case the girl needs help in the night.

The sucking noise is coming from the other side of the door. It's loud, bounces around in Shanks' ears as if it's an echo.

He opens the door. The night light is out, all there is are shadows from the moonlight, peeking in through the tattered curtains hanging over the open window. They never leave the window open, either. Monkey Meat might figure out how to climb out and go drown in the swamp on accident if they did.

A metallic smell of blood, the tangy acrid aftertaste of urine and shit and bile all mixed together hits his face like a slap. He looks at the floor near the crib, where the squishing noise is. He can see a long shape flat out and stock still, and a little bundle of a shape currently wobbling around on the floor next to the crib.

Shanks steps into the room and closes the door behind himself, drops to his knees, and takes in the blurry definition in this really bad light of a dismembered man in a cheap suit being eaten piecemeal by Monkey Meat.

The kid's grown a second row of teeth, sharper than the first and getting jagged, pushing the duller set forward and probably out of her mouth eventually. She tears at the meaty part of a cloth-covered thigh and chews delicately.

"Midnight snack, huh princess?" Shanks asks after he gives his stomach a moment to calm down.

Monkey Meat makes a giggling noise and waggles a flipper at Shanks, shoves the mostly-intact torso with arms still attached towards him.

Shanks covers the distance crawling on his hands and legs. His palms slide a little in the blood and whatever else was expelled at time of death. The knees of his jeans are soaked through immediately.

He reaches the torso and drags it towards him. It makes a wet noise against the soggy carpet, and Shanks has to swallow a couple times before proceeding.

He rolls the torso over and starts to rummage through the coat. The man's left arm becomes dislodged from the sleeve and slides free to the floor with a squish. Torn tendons dangle at one end, shredded so fine it reminds Shanks of pulled pork soaked in red chili sauce.

Inside the breast pocket is a flimsy piece of card stock with _Hexxx International_ printed in a cursive font on one side. On the back is a chicken-scratch of handwriting spelling out their address. There's nothing else in the pockets. No identifying papers, no wallet, not even clothing labels. All gone, ripped out, left in the car or at home, wherever that once was for the moron.

"This is gonna be between me and you, okay?" He says to Monkey Meat, low, almost at whisper level. He crumples the card in his hand, forms a fist around it. "Can you keep a this a secret for Daddy?"

Monkey Meat burbles around the bloody piece of human leg and claps her flippers together. The nubs at the end are growing, beginning to elongate, starting to look like human fingers.

Shanks smiles weakly. He's going to have to tell Pyre that she vomited up swamp muck in the night, start a good fight about who let her drink it _this_ time. He's going to have to be outraged, and disgusted, and not at all suspicious.

He gulps down a rise of bile, then crawls on all fours to the closet to get the industrial-sized bottle of bleach.


	4. earth time a go go time 4/6

The bizjet belongs to Jack Jacker. With his band he's this year's winner of The Competition, and is filthy rich as a result. Those who graduate from The Competition always are. He's also Pyre's old paramour, which makes Shanks itch under his skin for all the wrong reasons.

The private jet touches down on the edges of Heathrow. A limousine is waiting midway between the runway and the gates leading to the rest of the strip. A long-legged, whey-faced man is leaning against the limo with his arms crossed and his sunglasses on.

Pyre leads the way off the plane. Shanks carries Monkey Meat close to his chest, rubs a thumb against the back of the kid's head through the blanket, and wonders if he can get her to eat people on command.

Jacker ambles over to them as soon as they're clear of the plane and onto the tarmac. He grins with too many teeth and a stretchy face at Pyre.

"Hallo, Luvvy," he purrs. He ignores Shanks outright.

"You think you can do some on-command work for me, huh kid?" Shanks asks Monkey Meat.

Pyre's shoulders go up, and he slides himself between Shanks and Jacker.

"Thank you so much for the help, Jack," Pyre says with a constipated smile.

Jacker snorts and crosses his arms. "Well of course, but you're not gonna say anything now, right? We pax?"

The man leans closer to Pyre, fits his chin right against Pyre's shoulder. "We pax, Marvin? Yeah?"

"I'm gonna be sick," Shanks announces, and he stomps off towards the gate. A yellow hack is waiting there with a willowy person standing outside it, and Shanks would bet his last buck that its Tilde. "Just give him the blackmail shit and let's go!"

"I didn't tell him anything, just that you owed me a favour," Pyre yells over Jacker's angry shout. "He doesn't know what it is!"

Shanks gets to the gate and stands there, waiting for the operator to open it. He waves at Tilde, they cover their face with their hands and groan into them.

"It's not going to spread, damnit!" Pyre screeches.

"Tilly, you're a doll," Shanks drawls.

Tilde drops their hands and looks at the blanket that obviously holds Monkey Meat.

"I'm a god damned saint is what I am," they snarl.

**# # # #**

A two bedroom flat over a Chinese Laundromat in Brixton is all they can afford, and barely at that. Tilde somehow got two beds and a lopsided couch for them with their own meagre funds.

The radiator rattles and coughs under the window looking out on the street. Shanks flicks the light switch and a bare bulb lights up hanging off of two feet of wire in the middle of the ceiling.

"I used to live in a cottage by the sea," Pyre informs the room.

Shanks walks past carrying Monkey Meat under his arm like a sack of potatoes and says, "I bet." He peers into one bedroom, then the other. "Where are the doors?"

Pyre has no idea. He walks past the dying couch and examines the radiator. It's wobbling against the wall.

"Did they cost extra or something?" Shanks shouts from one bedroom, the furthest from the door it sounds like. Bed springs creak like weak kittens and Monkey Meat coos.

Shanks comes back into the main area sans Ancient Evil. "Me and the kid will shack up in the corner room."

Pyre squints down at the street through the window. There's an Indian curry shop across the road and one door down, the alley between the shop and the used bookstore has a large skip full of lots of little round things in it in full view of their flat. There are two white men running around it carrying empty buckets and waving their arms.

"Hey, you still with us?"

Pyre stops watching the insane fellows on the street and blinks at Shanks. He's perched on one arm of the couch with his arms crossed and eyebrows raised.

"I do believe I'll find some paying lecture work here," Pyre says. He doesn't want to point out the madmen, he hasn't the energy. He also doesn't want to talk about how _little_ said lectures actually pay. "This is generally late afternoon to early evening engagements, is that all right? You can watch it?"

Shanks looks back at the doorway leading to the room he claimed for himself and the monster. There's a sporadic creaking of springs coming from the bed in the room.

"Yeah sure, I can watch her," Shanks says. He gets up and walks to the bedroom. "Hey kid, don't fall off the bed. You'll go through the floor and scare the neighbours."

"Please don't mention neighbours," Pyre groans.

The latch on the front door to the flat clicks and Tilde strides in carrying two plastic Tesco sacks and a canvas tote bulging with mysterious objects. They dump all three bags on the small counter in the kitchenette and points a finger at Pyre. "I am not a maid, and I will not be treated as such."

"I never had the slightest urge to," Pyre says, confused.

Tilde nods and then stomps over to the Shanks' bedroom. They glare through the door. "I'm not your maid, you hear this?"

"Tilly, honey, I'm better at scrubbing than you and I'm a slob," Shanks drawls, then: "No, _no_. Monkey Meat, come on."

Tilde wrinkles their nose and goes back to the bags on the counter, puts the bottle of milk and package of meat in the icebox. "I'll get in touch with Inez and have her contact you with an appointment."

"I adore Inez," Shanks yells.

"Of course you do, you slept with her ten minutes after meeting her," Pyre says. He decides to try the couch. It wobbles under his weight and he decides to try it again later, when he's less breakable.

"You weren't talking to me cos I dumped paint on your suitcase," Shanks calls. "I had to do _something_."

"What does that have to do with anything," Pyre mutters. He looks out the window again. The two men are now inside the skip, rolling around on the contents. He represses a sigh and rubs at his jaw.

Tilde rolls their eyes and folds up the empty plastic bags into squares. "I'll be bringing your things tomorrow," they say. "Or at least, some of them. Your books, what do you need first?"

Pyre turns his back on the window to watch Tilde. "I don't know yet. The metaphysical texts, I suppose. Music as Spirituality in Relation to Mob Mentality," he says the last bit in a mocking sing-song tone. "Dear God, and it doesn't even pay well."

Tilde raises one eyebrow. It's their way of silently saying, "Well, _someone_ had to go and drop out of university to go to art school then, didn't they?"

"Stop it," Pyre says.

"I'm not saying a word," Tilde replies. They go to the door and open it, pause at the threshold.

"You're both all right, yes?" They ask. They dart their eyes around the dusty and mostly empty flat as a scared rabbit would a new cage surrounded by giants of hairless creatures. "You've got a solution to... all of this?"

Pyre rubs at the back of his neck and shrugs at her. It's the best response he has at the moment.

"Right, well, until tomorrow," Tilde sighs. They step out into the hallway and close the door with a quiet click behind them.

**# # # #**

Inez Madrigal doesn't mind helping them out of her friendship with Pyre, and she tells them so when they meet at a street side cafe in the more trendy part of London, close but not quite in Mayfair.

"What about what we shared, huh honey?" Shanks whines at her. He's grinning, he doesn't mean it. He never means anything.

Inez narrows her eyes. He's holding that creature thing in his lap, and it peers out at her with one eye.

"I want nothing to do with _that_ thing, yes?" she says. It blinks at her and she leans back in her seat as far as possible before she can stop herself.

"This kid is _great_ ," Shanks says. His grin is gone, now he's almost glaring at her. He wraps his arms around it and it snuggles close to his chest. "But yeah, if you're gonna be a shit about it I don't want you doing anything with her either."

"She's not being a shit," Pyre chides, then grins weakly at Inez. "You're just following self-preservation instincts, right?"

Inez quirks an eyebrow. Tilde is sitting to her left and coughs into their cuppa.

"There, there. I won't let the bad lady hurt you," Shanks coos at the creature.

"Don't make her the enemy!" Pyre hisses at Shanks, darts a look from Monkey Meat to Shanks to Inez and back again.

Inez looks at Tilde. Tilde sighs and takes a sip  
"It calls Marvin _Mama_ ," they say. "And I do believe Langston has graduated to Daddy since I last saw it."

"Damn straight I'm Daddy," Shanks growls. He pokes the creature in the cheek, it lets out a peal of laughter that has Inez shuddering in revulsion. "Isn't that right, huh? I'm daddy? I'm your daddy?"

"So you're better with it than Marvin?" she asks when the creature stops laughing. Pyre chokes on his mouthful of tea and splutters it all down his front. Shanks snickers at him.

Inez sighs, hands over her napkin to help with the cleanup. "I'm just saying what I see. Your black as pitch soul is something it resonates to."

"Why darling, I'm flattered," Shanks drawls, exaggerated and slurry. Then he winks.

"She's not complimenting you," Pyre wheezes.

"Your friends aren't flatterers, that's a good thing."

Pyre wipes at his mouth and narrows his eyes at Shanks. "Doesn't stop you from sleeping with them."

"I haven't slept with all of them!" Shanks throws up his hands. The creature imitates him, waves two flippers with nubs on the end and waggles them in the air.

"Yes, of course. You never slept with my long-dead _dog_ , of course."

Shanks looks stunned. "Colonel Puttputt is dead?!"

"Pamplimest!" he hisses.

Tilde groans and covers their eyes with both hands. "I should move to France."

"Why ever France?" Inez asks.

"Because they have that ban in place." Tilde drops their hands and stares at Monkey Meat. "They can't follow me there."

"We didn't follow you," Pyre snaps at the same time that Shanks sing-songs, "Come play with us Tilly, forever and ever and ever!"

Tilde looks sour. Monkey Meat stares back at them, unblinking.

"Tilde told me that it’s growing," Inez says. She taps her finger on the table next to her coffee cup, watched the creature watch the motion of her finger. "Have you considered space as an avenue?"

Shanks looks at Pyre, and Pyre looks at Shanks. They both look at Inez, then shrug.

Their indifference isn't a shock, but she's not terribly happy about it. She stands, picks up her Prada jacket that she had thrown over the back of her chair, and steps away from the table.

"Fine, then. After I call around I'll be in touch," she says coolly. Then she leaves.

**# # # #**

The metro station is a mere fifty yards from their flat. Shanks carries Monkey Meat under the zippy sweatshirt and scowls at the sidewalk.

Pyre ignores him. They still have to figure out what to eat tonight. There's only thirty pounds left in his wallet, and they need to reserve metro fare for when Inez calls again.

The curry shop comes into view before the laundromat because of its brightly coloured awning. It's orange and faded and looks like it's supposed to be retractable but got stuck at some point when it was halfway out. There's movement and rattling noises coming from the skip in the alley between the curry shop and the bookstore, audible even over the slow meander of traffic rolling 24kph down the street.

They're about level with said curry shop when the shorter of the crazed skip-climbers runs out onto the pavement, shouts "SCURRILOUS BASTARD, I ADORE YOU," then runs back into the alley.

"You wanna carry her?" Shanks asks when they stop in front of the door to their building. He appears largely unconcerned with the men across the street, he looks at Pyre with a blank expression and a hint of a hunch to his shoulders.

Pyre frowns at the skip. They're on top of something shiny, and it bothers him. Are they terrorists? Insane fellows? Running an art installation?

He steps away from Shanks out into the street, says over his shoulder, "Not now."

Monkey Meat makes a distressed noise, Shanks grumbles something unintelligible to it, then Pyre is across the street now and can't hear them anymore regardless.

"I told you, it's the jasmine bags that are the best for sleep," the short one is saying to the taller, much pointier fellow sitting in the skip with him. They look like gentlemen out for an afternoon jaunt down the river in a rowboat for two, not cruisers of an alley on a rolling skip full of garbage.

"It's _lavender_ ," the taller man says to him. He's got black hair and white skin, too many angles in his face and not enough clothing to leave him decent.

He also notices Pyre standing there and raises a hand to him. "Hey."

"Hallo." Pyre attempts a feeble wave. "I'm, ah. I’m Pyre, live right across the street from..." he gestures at the skip, "...from your little _pad_ here."

The shorter man's got brown hair and brown eyes and brown everything, skin, facial hair, t-shirt, smear of something down his neck. He looks suspiciously at Pyre. "Are you here to complain? Because we have a permit."

"No, no of course not!" He tries to ratchet up the welcoming grin, then stops when a fly divebombs his teeth. "I'd just like to assuage my curiosity, is all. Can I ask what you're doing out here day after day?"

"Training for space, of course!" the short one announces. He's got an American accent and talks much too loud for polite company.

The taller one rolls his eyes and mutters, "Here we go again." This one is a posh Brit, it seems.

"Shush, you," the shorter one says. He leans partially out of the skip and the tall one grabs the back of his shirt to keep him from falling to the asphalt headfirst. "Hey, hey Mister _Pyre_ , do you believe in spacemen?"

"I'm currently investigating the possibilities, in fact," Pyre says. He does not take a step back, but only because the man's height has also transferred to his limbs, and he definitely doesn't have the reach to grab at him. "How does a skip full of..." he peers into the skip by bobbling onto his toes for a moment, "marbles. Oh my. How does a skip full of marbles help train one for space?"

"It's a sleep number bed kind of thing," the tall one says. He smiles wide. "Koval here came up with it, he's brilliant."

Koval shimmies backwards, back into the skip. He holds up a hand toward the tall one, who gives him a high five. "Not as brilliant as my man Hallas here!"

The man leans forward again, but not so far, to conspiratorially whisper, "He has a Masters in business."

Pyre hums in what he hopes is proper awe. Hallas nods at him.

"Good form on the noncommittal, mate. Excellent way to deal with Koval until you're used to him."

"Hey!" Koval squawks.

"I'm a bit lost," Pyre admits. He points to the sky. " _Space_ space? That _is_ what we're talking about here, yes?"

"Well it's not like marbles would do us a damn lick of good in an eternal void or something," Koval scoffs. He picks up a cat's eye and inspects it. "Can't eat them, and I think in great black abysses you need food to survive."

Hallas props his chin on his hand and leans his elbow on the edge of the skip. To Pyre he says, "Sleeping on a spaceship is nerve-wracking. So if we're used to lying in one place on these chilled things, we've got a viable simulation of sleeping in space."

"It's very cold in space, yeah," Koval agrees. He discards the marble and picks up one that's as big as his fist. "This is the one digging into my ass, I can see the assmarks on the surface."

"There are no assmarks on any of these marbles," Hallas says. He sounds tired. "Give it a rest."

Pyre is fully overwhelmed, but it's nice to know that these men have at least a logical progression to their antics. He bobbles his head up and down and holds up both hands to say goodbye as he backs out onto the pavement. "I must be getting back, dinner time and all. Thank you for the chat, I'm much more informed now."

"No problemo, neighbouro," Koval shouts after him. "Come by before we leave for space, we'll have a beer next door!"

"There's no such word as _neighbouro_ ," Pyre hears Hallas say before he's across the street and in front of their building again. Shanks and Monkey Meat are gone. He can only assume they headed inside while he performed his investigation.

A full-fledged chav folding laundry at a table under the window of the laundromat eyeballs him as he stands there looking around. He pretends he's got something in his eye and staggers into the door to let himself in.


	5. earth time a go go time 5/6

Severin Jones is the Head of Operations for the Western Europe branch of Mylon Husk's space tourism company. He got the job through hard work, not taking any shit, and delegating trash duty among everyone equally so he couldn't be called a dictator on his rise through the company.

He looks at this duo standing in his office with wide-eyed looks on their faces and wonders whose turn it is to haul rubbish down to the street and to dump them on their _asses_.

"There's a waiting list," Jones says. He flips open a red folder at the latest dispatch for Chimera Hangdog supplies, flips it shut again. "You're not on it, right?"

He levels his best "don't fuck with me" glare at the stockier of the two. He looks like the most trouble, the other one's probably strung out on drugs because no one sober would ever wear shimmering _teal_ pants to a business meeting.

"We're kind of in a bind," the stocky guy says. He flashes a grin like he's in the habit, shrugs his shoulders. "It's a long shot, but you can't blame us for trying."

"Of course I can blame you for trying," Jones snaps. He points at the twiggy, shiny pants one. "You're what, wanting to _commune with the stars_? Some kind of spiritual journey through the great old big empty for your own fulfilment?"

The teal pants guy blinks and says in a prissy British accent, "I beg your pardon?"

The shorter one's grin gets wider.

Jones sighs and reaches into the small shelf under his desk where he keeps his stress toys. His new stress ball rolls right into his hand and he grabs at it with a death grip.

"I know all about you dope types, all right. You say you want to go on a _spiritual journey_ or some fucking shit, but all you do is go onto the terraformed planets, leave a mess on your way there, and try to take over wherever you land."

The grinning guy scratches the back of his head and raises his eyebrows. "British Colonialism doesn't really factor in to our plans. Sorry, man."

The tall guy startles. "I have no idea what's going on here, but I don't like it."

"You don't have to fucking like it, I'm not helping you fuck up space on top of everything," Jones snarls, furiously squeezing the stress ball under the desk. It wheezes in distress under his fingers. "The answer is no. No _fucking_ way."

"What's that squeaking noise?" the stocky one asks and looks around the room.

The tall guy waves a hand at his friend, frowns at Jones. "From what I understand, getting off the planet is the difficult part," he says, "we can find continued transport once we're in space, if Mister Husk's company cannot transport us the entire way."

"Two words." Jones bares his teeth in a grin. "Waiting. List."

"How long is said list, then?" The tall one narrows his eyes at Jones.

The stocky one, meanwhile, is still fucking looking about the room. "Come on, where's that noise coming from?"

Jones forces himself to stop strangling the stress ball. The stocky guy grins at him as immediately.

"Two years give or take, gentlemen," Jones forces himself to drawl. "In the meantime, you'll go through health checks, mental stability checks, financial checks, background checks, criminal records expunged--" at that the tall one blanches, which Jones _knew_ he would, damn it these fuckers are all the same "--and anything suspicious will be dragged on out into the light of day to see if you're _fit_ for space travel on Mister Husk's grand old tourist boats."

"All that and more, huh?" The stocky guy says. He raises his eyebrows at his friend. "You'd never pass the mental shit."

" _Langston_ ," the tall guy hisses. Then to Jones, "So sorry to waste your time, then."

Time to play it innocent. Jones does his best to affix a wide-eyed look on his face. He practises in the mirror sometimes to get it right. "You don't want on the waiting list?"

"No, thank you." The tall guy says, stiff and formal. "We'll find alternate methods of transport."

The other one, _Langston_ , grins back at Jones as they leave his office. Jones drops the innocent look and glares.

**# # # #**

Koval and Hallas are back in their skip. Pyre spends all of two seconds contemplating his next action before he leaves the flat without a word to go talk to them.

"What kind of training is this good for?" he asks as soon as he's across the street.

Koval's head shoots up from the skip like a prairie dog. He grins at Pyre, waggles his eyebrows. "It's a sleep number--"

"Bed thing, yes, got it, but what _use is it_?" Pyre interrupts. "Will you survive better? All because you roll around in a skip full of marbles prior to takeoff?"

Hallas struggles up into a sitting position and frowns at Pyre.

"Sleep deprivation is no joke," Hallas tells him, "and yeah, it helps with survival. Why would we do this, otherwise?"

"It's training! For space!" Koval waves his arms around and accidentally backhands Hallas in the mouth. "We'll have our crew and we'll traverse the stars and we'll be able to do it longer and better because we'll be trained for the rigours of zero gravity vibration issues!"

Pyre considers this while Koval apologises to Hallas for hitting him by licking at his face like a dog.

"You're mappers?" he asks. Mappers are the only designation he's really heard much about, via a PBS special he saw in a hotel room once.

"Hired pilots for directional cargo and passenger transport," Hallas corrects as he shoves Koval away from his face. "Mappers generally work for a single corporation their entire career, we're more freelance."

"We'll make our way to _Venus_ , eventually. They're terraforming the entire thing, it's gonna be awesome. Nothing but jungles as far as the eye can see, and we can all be naughty."

Hallas shakes his head at Pyre. That's a negative on the naughty, apparently.

"I thought Venus was a giant ball of gas?" Pyre asks.

Koval sucks on his lower lip in contemplation.

"They must be making it solid, then," is what he decides on.

Hallas shakes his head again. That's another negative, this on the future solidity of a giant gaseous planet.

"Are you hiring a crew right now?"

Koval laughs. And laughs. And laughs.

Hallas is the one who shouts over the laughter. "We're hired workers, as soon as our boss assembles a crew we go up."

Pyre looks around the dark alley. There isn't anyone around. He takes a step closer, which makes Koval shut up and Hallas raise his eyebrows.

"Who is hiring? Do you know?" He asks, a little too eagerly.

Koval and Hallas exchange a look. Koval shrugs, Hallas shrugs back.

"Troublesome Spacegum Inc hired us," Koval supplies. He tilts his head and scratches at his neck. "The big competitor for Mylon Husk's shit."

Pyre perks up. "They're on par with Husk's operation?"

"Not exactly on _par_ ," Hallas says slowly, "just in the same field of space travel."

Pyre has so many questions. Who does he talk to get on board with an Ancient Evil and another hanger on, being the first one. But his mobile rings in his pocket and he staggers back two steps to answer it before he can start the interrogation.

It's Tilde on the caller display. He answers as politely as possible, holding a hand up in apology to the men sitting on a pile of marbles.

"Miller's come down with a bit of a virus I'm afraid," Tilde says in lieu of a hello. They sound distant, noncommittal, even over the phone. "Perhaps something he ate."

"And you gave them my name?"

"Naturally."

Pyre glances up at the flat's windows. The light is on in the main room, but he can't see Shanks' shadow moving around. Maybe he's in the kitchen, cooking.

"If I leave now?" he asks Tilde.

"You'll make it in time to make friends," Tilde answers.

Pyre looks back at the men, who are both watching him curiously, Koval a bit more obvious with it than Hallas.

"So sorry, a job just came up and I must dash," he says to them with a smile. And, he notices with a jolt, he's smiling because he's feeling pleased, not because it's the polite thing to do.

Koval waves him off and falls back into the skip, disappearing. Hallas waves too, but he shouts "Knock 'em dead" as Pyre jogs down the street.

"Tilde?" he says into his mobile.

Tilde hums, still on the line.

"I'll be there in less than twenty minutes."

It doesn't occur to him that he should let Shanks know where he's off too until he's already on the tube heading for North London, and by then the reception on his mobile is gone.

**# # # #**

The only club that plays live acts late during the workweek is Cranky Braggart. Shanks can't be choosy, but he damn hell wishes there was a better one around. Mostly ones that pay better.

He takes in the shaggy carpet on the walls and the bleary-eyed drunks sitting in clusters of threes and sixes scattered at the tables. He's playing the bridge to some jazz standard, he doesn't remember what, but it's one that he goes on automatic with when he needs a break during a four hour set with no end in sight.

Monkey Meat clutches at a stained teddy bear with her little nubs of fingers. They haven't grown for a month at least, maybe longer. Shanks doesn't know much about Ancient Evil biology, but he assumes that the kid should still be growing, not just stop like that.

Maybe she's growing on the inside. Maybe that black hole of hers is getting bigger.

Shanks misses a note, and some wiseguy two tables from the little piano stage hollers at him, "Hey, learn how to play properly!"

Shanks nods at the heckler and grits his teeth. If he hits the guy with a chair, Monkey Meat might get exposed. Monkey Meat gets exposed, she might open that Black and Decker mouth of hers and vacuum the guy.

Not that it'd be a bad thing. No, the bad thing would him being stiffed his promised two hundred quid because his kid ate a paying customer.

"I _said_ , learn how to play! Where'd you practise your craft, Dusty's Picnic and Saloon over in the colonies?"

Some of the drunks hoot laughter at that. Shanks relaxes his wrists, plays a bit faster. Almost time to up the tempo and launch into some bawdy ballad about small penises making showgirls laugh.

Not for the first time today, Shanks wonders where the fuck Pyre is.

"When the hell did I turn out to be the responsible one in life," Shanks asks the crowd.

**# # # #**

"Albert Einstein as played by Tim Crude is the local billionaire insane man about town," Inez tells them. She didn't have to look far to find her information on this man, which annoys her; she was hoping for a challenge. "He _does_ prefer to send missions into space, but rather as little pretty doomed things, so he can make speeches when they are lost or explode."

"Oh, perfect," Shanks drawls. "Let's get in contact with

him

, he sounds great."

Pyre nods with a somber look on his face. "Yes, lets. He's probably our best shot."

Shanks looks at Pyre in shock and Tilde snorts into their hand. Inez watches the two men closely, but Monkey Meat whimpers and she has to refocus.

The monster sits by itself at the table, low on the chair and its eye barely clearing the tabletop. Pyre carried it in and dumped it as soon as he could. Shanks had glared fire at the back of Pyre's head as he watched.

"How fares the creature?" Inez asks, surprising even herself.

"Did better on the subway this time," Shanks answers. He's still staring at Pyre's head, who is in turn ignoring the other man's existence completely and focusing on a travel magazine Inez left out on the table. "She's getting used to being around strangers without freaking, it's cool."

Monkey Meat burbles at Shanks, and he stops glaring at Pyre so he can grin at it.

"Do you ever leave it on its own?"

Shanks looks at her in horror. "She's a _baby_!"

Pyre puts down the magazine and twists in his seat to give Shanks a look.

"It's a creature of calamitous nature that will eventually destroy the world. We don't leave it alone because it could _kill_ people if we did!"

Shanks squares his shoulders and crosses his arms as he looks down his nose. "Or we don't leave her alone because she's small and defenceless and could get _hurt_ on her own!"

Monkey Meat makes a high-pitched whining noise that Inez winces at. Shanks steps around the chairs to go pick up the creature and shush it.

"You're getting too attached to something as dangerous as a bomb," Pyre snipes.

Inez considers herself an adaptable personality, so she's getting used to the creature but that doesn't mean she wants to touch it, so of course Shanks walks around the table just to dump the monster into her lap. She fights the urge to shove it to the floor in a fit of survival instinct.

Monkey Meat blinks up at her owlishly and mouths at its fingers. Inez tentatively puts a hand on its back to steady it.

Nope, still want to toss it from her person. This is torture.

Shanks grabs Pyre by the back of his collar and drags him just outside the door. He doesn't close it, they're only four feet away from where they started so everyone can hear every word as if they had stayed in their original places, but whatever.

Tilde takes pity on Inez and leans over to distract Monkey Meat from her by tapping their fingers on the table to keep its attention.

Inez glares at them. They could just _take_ the creature, but no.

"Well, _I_ don't think you're taking this seriously!" Shanks shouts.

Pyre's crossed his arms and shakes his head. "You're humanising it. This isn't a good way to go about things and you know it. What if it sucks up an entire town? Will you defend it then? What if it eats _us_?"

" _She_ won't do that!" Shanks is waving his arms, hands slashing through the air like blades, in a heavy contrast to Pyre just standing there turned in on himself. "Come on, you can't say you don't care for her at least a little? Why are you even here then?"

"I'm here because I have to be." Pyre sounds tired to Inez's ears. "You're the one who can leave if you wish."

Monkey Meat mumbles in Inez's lap and squirms closer to her stomach. She lets it, focusing too much on Shanks' face, which has contorted into something mean.

"Maybe I should just take the kid and go on my own, huh? It's not like you're around her much anymore. You high-tail it out as soon as you can." Shanks' shoulders go lax, he tips his chin up to glare at Pyre full-force. "Maybe that's what you're working on, huh? Make me pissed off enough to just leave with her, so you don't feel _obligated_ anymore."

"I have work to do," Pyre bites out. Now he's the tense one, shoulders hunched and chin down in defence. "I deliver lectures, and that takes a lot of work for very little money. Money that _you_ use for food and conveniences! I don't have time to--"

"Hey, I spent time with the kid when _I_ was working, so cut that shit out," Shanks snarls.

"Oh yes, getting on stage to tinkle a piano once a night for a few hours is so terribly hard work upon a person, I see it now." Pyre abruptly slams his palms flat into Shanks' shoulders, making the man take a step back. "You don't have notes to prepare, and presentations to make on second-hand computers, and you don't have to be _smart_."

Shanks goes still.

"You calling me stupid?"

" _Am_ I calling you stupid, for christ's sakes it's called grammar!"

"I always knew you were a entitled _ass_ ," Shanks says in an even, low tone, "but I guess I didn't know how far it went."

"Perhaps we should all take a moment--" Tilde starts.

"Tilly, stay out of this!" Shanks shouts over her.

Monkey Meat shrieks, then tapers off into a plaintive and distressed cry.

Shanks whirls away from Pyre to run to the monster. Inez covers her ears and watches it open its mouth wide and suck the edge of the tablecloth into its throat.

"Hey, hey baby," Shanks coos at it as it cries some slick oily substance from its eye and slurps down the fabric. "Chill a bit, okay? It's all right, I'll stop yelling."

The tablecloth disappears completely, and Inez leans as far away from the thing as she can with it still in her lap. "I intend to be compensated for that."

Shanks glares at her over Monkey Meat's head. He wraps his arms around the monster and hugs it close. It opens its nubby fingers and clutches at the lapels of his trencher, clings to him tight.

"We're gonna get some air," Shanks bites out. He gathers up the creature in his arms and leaves.

Silence is the room, and the room is silence. Inez sighs and considers how much alcohol she has at home, and if she should stop to get more before she goes back there tonight.

"What do you wish to do? Do we talk to this man?" Tilde asks, looks at Pyre.

He says, "Yes, lets," and smiles at Inez weakly before he leaves the room too.

Inez shakes her head and hands over the paper with the contact info to Tilde. Not her people, not her problem.

**# # # #**

Troublesome Spacegum's Corporate Headquarters take up an entire storey of rented offices over a three star gourmet fish and chips restaurant down in Canary Warf. Tilde and Pyre have a three o'clock appointment with the CEO and Founder himself, Albert Einstein as played by Tim Crude.

The man's secretary leads them into the office after a ten minute wait. He closes the door behind them, then stands to the side as the big kahuna of Space Tourism after Mylon Husk himself gets up to greet them. The man is short, his teeth are too big for his mouth, and his shaggy head of brown hair is reminiscent of a surfer dude, not a man of business.

Introductions are had, the big boss is magnanimous as Tilde offers praise and platitudes, and then they sit down in comfy chairs to discuss business.

The meeting goes something like this:  
\- Albert Einstein as played by Tim Crude pontificates about the monopoly of space travel as held by Mylon Husk.  
\- Then he rages about his lack of attractiveness in the latest "Hot Billionaires" poll.  
\- Finally, he kicks over a rubbish bin.

As the man stands like a vengeful White God over the huddled masses of a third world population in place of the knocked over bin, Tilde exchanges a glance with Pyre before speaking up. The clock on the wall shows they've been there for only six minutes, how distressing.

"Might you have any trips scheduled in the near future?" They sound tentative, and it's probably because they're scared shitless.

Albert Einstein as played by Tim Crude snorts through his massive beak of a nose like a bull and nudges the bin on the floor with his Italian Leather-clad toe.

"Yeah, yeah. We got three on the docket. One for Mars, first of its kind cos it's a straight shot, right? And we got two cargo trips to an outfit in some nebula."

Pyre's eyes are wide. Tilde shakes their head at him, he nods just to contradict them.

"How much would it cost, hypothetically, to be a part of one of those trips?" Pyre asks, despite Tilde shaking their head so hard it makes their neck hurt.

"Eh, I don't know." Albert Einstein as played by Tim Crude looks up at the calender hung on his wall. The year across the top is three years gone, but it has an exquisite picture of a turtle perched upon a rock on it. "Mortimer, how much for passengers to Mars?"

His secretary pokes his head in. Said head is very dignified in bearing, despite being in employ of who Tilde assumes is one of the biggest loons since the first Mime in Space.

"Five hundred per passenger to Mars, one way trip," the secretary says. Then he retracts his head like a turtle and disappears.

"Oh that's quite reasonable," pyre says. Tilde shakes their head at him, but he doesn't see.

"You sign on as crew and you'll be _paid_ , though!" Albert Einstein as played by Tim Crude claps his hands together and rubs them. "Just a little bit of training, you give an interview or two after the mission is successful, what do you say?"

Tilde rears back in their seat, fully convinced that this man is absolutely mad.

Then they look at Pyre, who is grinning wide and gazing at the Billionaire with absolute adoration, and they think quite succinctly, " _Oh shit_."

"Mortimer, contracts!" Albert Einstein as played by Tim Crude shouts, then slides off his desk to perch on the arm of the overstuffed chair Pyre is sitting in. "Let me show you the contract so you know what the offer is?"

"He's not trained, why are you offering him a job?" Tilde asks.

Pyre doesn't hear them, and the little man playing his snake charmer song to entrance him ignores them fully.

The secretary walks in carrying a stack of paper over an inch thick. He hands it to his employer, levels a blank look at Tilde, then leaves.

Tilde's not sure this is the best option, despite the need to get Monkey Meat off somewhere that isn't Earth. Have they tried the Eastern Bloc yet? Have they even made any calls to investigate the possibility of some ancient Russian Bubushka sitting out in the Taiga with a solution in her brain?

They look at Pyre, reading the contract proposal and still grinning.

" _Langston is going to be furious_ ," they almost say but choke on the words.

Albert Einstein as played by Tim Crude looks over Pyre's bent head at them and grins, wide.

"How about you, honey?"

Tilde narrows their eyes and presses their lips together as hard as possible to fight back the snarl that threatens.

"Just a passenger ticket for me, thank you."

Judging by the way the man's grin widens, they didn't succeed in keeping the snarl down. How terribly annoying.


End file.
